A speech act which is performed indirectly is sometimes known as an indirect speech act Indirect speech acts are often felt to be more polite ways of performing certain kinds of speech act, such as requests and refusals. According to Searle, when a speaker is using indirect language, he is performing two speech acts simultaneously: one is the primary speech act and the other is the second speech act. The primary one is the speaker's goal of communication and the second one is the means by which he achieves his goal.

The utterance of A is a kind of invitation， which expresses that A wants to go to the football match tonight with B. But B doesn't directly answer yes or no. B's answer “I  have to prepare tomorrow's presentation”， the propositional meaning is what the utterance says about the speaker's upcoming presentation. The illocutionary force is the effect A wants the utterance to have on B. That is B turns down A's invitation.