Words that are just speech acts

This is an offshoot of thinking about NLF2DWS.

What words are not quite "real" words but rather just speech acts?

For example, "yes" and "no" have no real semantic content that I can
tell appart from their use as a confirmatory or negatory speech act.
They have to have the context to mean anything. "Dog" does not.

What are other examples of this? Why is this the case?

I'm not quite sure how to formulate the question; I just am fairly
sure that it's going to be an important distinction for NLF2DWS design
and at present it's hard for me to grasp. So feel free to elaborate it
yourself.

 - Sai

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