This article focuses on two topics that figure prominently in Tsohatzidis’ work, namely prototypes and speech acts (Tsohatzidis 1990, 1994) and discusses their role in grammatical analysis. Drawing on earlier and more recent work on έλα-based dialogic constructions (Nikiforidou et al. 2014, Nikiforidou 2025), we argue that (a) the concept of prototype facilitates grammatical analysis in allowing for generalizations that systematically (but not necessarily) characterize dialogic constructions with έλα and (b) the speech acts performed by these dialogic constructions are conventionally associated with specific morpho-syntactic and prosodic features and are therefore part of the meaning and function of the respective constructions. Locating the argument in the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar (e.g. Fillmore et al. 1988, Goldberg 1995, 2006, Hoffmann & Trousdale 2013, Fried 2015, Fried & Nikiforidou 2025) we show how the concept of construction, as conventional pairing of meaning and form, naturally accommodates both the prototype effects in the formal and semantic-pragmatic features of these patterns and the conventional links between prosody and syntax, on the one hand, and the speech acts performed, on the other.