H. argues that speech act theory ('Sprechhandlungstheorie') as practised by U. Maas and D. Wunderlich is still too close to the study of an abstract linguistic competence in the Chomskyan sense. To show how the treatment of language as an activity could be improved, he presents an overview of the pragmatic notions in the work by B.Malinowski, K.L.Pike, D.H.Hymes, and in the speech activity theory ('Sprechtätigkeitstheorie') offered by A.A.Leont'ev.