In this short squib, I reopen the issue whether declarations, including explicit performatives, are a special case of assertions (namely, self-verifying assertions), or whether they form a distinct type of speech acts (namely, acts that do not describe the world but change it). I argue that languages with a realis/irrealis distinction bear on this issue because, under the second hypothesis, they should not show realis but irrealis morphology. This is indeed the case in the Oceanic language Daakie spoken in Ambrym, Vanuatu.