The article discusses the connections between classical rhetoric and speech act theory of John Austin and John Searle, with regard to genre and interpretive research on occasional works of early Slovak literature. It builds on the traditional aims of rhetoric and the role of the rhetorician (in the spirit of Aristotle, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, and Marcus Tullius Cicero), as well as on insights into the connections between Aristotelian kinds of rhetoric and the typology of illocutionary acts highlighted by Walter H. Beale, Emmanuelle Danblon, and Cristina Pepe. The author applies selected tools proposed by Teun A. van Dijk for research into the pragmatics of literary communication: the notion of the indirect speech act in relation to the functional syncretism of early literature and the notion of the macro-speech-act in relation to the communicative function of the literary text as a whole. The article aims at defining occasional literary works on the basis of their pragmatic function and to characterise selected genres of occasional literature (supported by older theory of poetic and rhetorical theory). Following the work of the intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, the author outlines the ways in which speech act theory can be used in the interpretation of occasional literary works of Slovak literature of earlier periods.