Speech act theory has been studied using artificial or small-world examples in many
research fields such as philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. It is, however,
unclear how this theory is applicable to real activities in the actual world. In this pa-
per, we reconsider the speech act theory based on analyses of “commanding”utterances
used by the leader of a group working together to drag big trees out of a forest. Our
field involves i) a large number of actors participating in the activity, ii) huge objects
manipulated in a huge space, and iii) physical actions performed in real time. These
characteristics require some conditions that are to be met for a “commanding”utterance
to be used felicitously. We show that these preparatory conditions of “commanding”
are tightly connected to the prerequisites of the physical action that the commander
requests the hearers to perform. We also demonstrate how the preparatory conditions
are achieved interactively, concurrently, and in a situation-dependent fashion through
multi-party collaborative interaction.
