Stanley Fish is a major theorist of post-structuralist reception theory in America, and an early adopter of the pragmalinguistic theory of speech acts in its application to literature. He is also well known for his critique of formalist linguistics and stylistics. This paper examines from a critical standpoint his theories on the arbitrariness of the signifier, pointing out the shortcomings of his theory of language, and questioning more specifically Fish’s interpretation of the structure of speech acts, with reference to the analyses by Austin and Searle.