A consideration of the beginning of Paul's letter to the Romans, leads W. to the introduction of the notion of 'relocution' as a fourth aspect of the speech act (i.e. the possibility for the hearer to (re)assess the rules and circumstances which broughtthe speech act about) and to a discussion of negative speech acts such as 'Ich schäme mich des Evangeliums nicht' (which have usually been called cases of litotes in stylistics).