This article addresses the motivation and constraints of illocutionary meaning production. Within the framework of the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM), I explore how our knowledge of illocution is understood in terms of high-level situational models which are activated to produce speech act meaning and the way such operations motivate the conventionalized value of linguistic expressions. In so doing, I analyze the realization procedures of the Aux NP construction in relation to their

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... l to exploit the semantic base of requestive acts. I will study the most conventional linguistic realizations of the construction and explore the way in which such realizations are used to produce a requestive meaning. The resulting account provides a comprehensive understanding of the constructional nature of illocutionary meaning on the basis of naturally occurring data.