Pragmatics as a Component vs. Pragmatics as a Perspective of Linguistics

The discussion of pragmatics as a component or a perspective of linguistics was started in the 1970’es in Haberland and Mey (1977). I am not going to claim that “Continental Pragmatics” (as Stephen Levinson called the perspective school in 1982) has the correct approach and that some other (should we call it “Insular Pragmatics”?) is wrong. My claim is that they complement each other and that both are needed in their own way. I give examples of how the “pragmatic question par excellence”, viz. “How did this utterance come to be produced?” (Haberland and Mey 1977:8) an be reformulated in order to highlight current issues in pragmatic investigations and to help us formulate some (new) questions, not all of which have an easy answer.