60 Discourse and Rape obliged to pass the salt. These types of acts are labelled as Indirect Speech Acts. They have the grammatical shape of questions that may be classified as requests for information, but they may be assertions. Without having the grammatical forms of imperatives or commands, they have a force of a directive. According to Ehrlich (2001, 140), there is a possibility of a disjunction between the intentional illocutionary force of an utterance and its perlocutionary effects. In her example, a woman feels threatened by the sexual banter of a male co-worker could be construed as an unintended effect of the illocutionary act. While the male co-worker may be intending to perform the act of “teasing” in making a sexually explicit comment, the woman may draw inferences or conversational implicatures based on her cultural knowledge about women’s vulnerability to sexual harassment. Ehrlich’s example shows a mismatch between the speaker’s intention and the hearer’s interpretation. The illocutionary force of “teasing” may be very clear, but the perlocutionary effects may be varied and unpredictable. The woman may give in to the notion of “teasing,” or in contrast, she may consider the illocutionary force as “insulting” or “demeaning.” Ehrlich further comments that since the tradition of speech act theory has focused on intentional illocutions of speakers, the contribution of perlocutionary effects to determine what an utterance means has been ignored. Speaker intentions, especially those of the lawyers’ and the judges’, may reveal attempts to impose gendered ideological frames or rape myths on women complainants, and these discursive practices (everyday-reality expressions/actions and dynamics of the interaction) may lead to the secondary victimization of these complainants during the rape trial proceedings. On the other hand, intended or unintended perlocutionary effects on the part of the witnesses (including the complainant and the accused) may be unlimited in kind and number and may not be very predictable (Levinson 1983, 192). The witnesses may adhere to the speaker’s intentions, or mitigate, contest, challenge and resist the speaker’s proferred illocutionary act. Thus, a witness may either refuse to be revictimized in the courtroom or s/he may reinforce gendered ideological frames prescribed by the speakers in particular speech