The major objectives of this study are to attempt to situate the speech act of threatening in the classification of speech acts and – on the basis of the linguistic and social factors conditioning the use of this speech act – to define the speech act of threatening for the purpose of analyzing the linguistic material. Additionally, the paper seeks to propose the main structure of the aforementioned speech act and a variety of factors conditioning its use in modern German and Polish. The primary object of research in this work is the speech act of threatening analysed within the methodology of pragmalinguistics. The research material is composed of examples of the speech act of threatening in modern spoken Polish and German. The analysis of the speech act of threatening presented in this study is an introduction and it will be further elaborated on in a monograph study of this topic.