To test the claim that verbs consistently occur in particular illocutionary contexts and that illocutionary context thus should be included in models of early verb meanings, a Dutch-speaking child participated in a naturalistic case study in his home, as he grew between the ages of two and three years. The researcher taped the child's interactions with his parents, for a total of 24 hours of audio and visual recordings. The visual recordings provided immediate physical context for the child's utterances, which facilitated the pragmatic analysis. The child's utterances in context were analyzed in terms of Searle's traditional speech act framework, which strongly connects speech acts, felicity conditions, and situational context. Results revealed that verbs do not have regularly appearing properties related to the communicative context that distinguish one verb from another; however, each verb has a number of context features that frequently appear together. These clustered features argue for a prototype framework for early verb acquisition. The results also show that a level of illocutionary-situational verb meaning must be taken into account, and that the early symbolic use of verbs is quite different from the symbolic use of object words. This could be because of the complexity of verbs, which require children to make abstractions on the pragmatic level, rather than on the representational level as is the case with object words. (SKC)