Dell Hymes created the "Dell Hymes Model of Speaking" mnemonic device as a tool for analysing speech acts and speech events from a sociolinguistic point of view. He later served as President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics which greatly influenced discourse analysis studies in this field.

Students of pragmatics often learn his summation of the concept of pragmatics as "knowing what to say to who, when and where."

Dell Hymes' personal web site can be accessed at http://www.virginia.edu/anthropology/dhymes.html