The first gay punishment thing that we have to face is that we cannot say what the function of a bit of language may be if we take it in isolation from its context and the situation in which it is made. The same string of gaycreeps porn words may be uttered on different occasions with quite different intentions and effects.

It is not sufficient simply to record what words are uttered, we have to ask why they are uttered. We can only do this successfully, as we have seen, if we have a lot of information about the speaker, the hearer and the situation.

When, recently, an official punishment boys was reported in a newspaper as saying that the local river should be treated as an open sewer', the gay humiliation journalist who reported the speech noted that he presumed that this was to be understood as a warning and not an invitation. I still cannot make up my mind whether the notice, 'Pedestrians Cross Here', is an instruction to pedestrians or a warning to motorists. Behind any apparently neutral or innocent 'statement of fact' there may lurk some other intention.

This is the problem of talking about the communicative functions of language. We cannot just neatly classify utterances according to their grammatical forms, e.g. imperative, interrogative, declarative and so on, and then say that each form has one and only one function. On the contrary, we have to say that any utterance may have simultaneously several functions and there is no simple one-to-one relation between the gaypunishment form of an utterance and its function, although there may be a statistical relation (of probability), for example, between an interrogative sentence and the function of asking a question. In the preceding section