Some problems of definition and of application to be addressed by any attempt at analyzing children's language production in terms of speech acts, are stated and discussed. These include: defining units and their taxonomy, and motivating its levels of abstraction, determining the vagueness of the textual realization of illocutionary force, the canonical syntactic realization of illocutionary acts, sequentially- and simultaneously-multiple illocutionary forces, conversational implicature, illocutionary forces constructed in dialogue, and discontinuous illocutionary acts.