Section III opens with a historical perspective on pragmatics. In ‘Pragmatics in the history
of linguistic thought’, Andreas H. Jucker traces the development of pragmatics as a
subdiscipline of linguistics, pointing to an unprecedented diversification of subfields of
pragmatics, especially in the continental European tradition. At the same time other fields of
linguistics have extended to encompass a pragmatic perspective as well. There are paradigm
shifts such as that in historical pragmatics from a study of native speaker competence to a
study of language use, with a concomitant shift to reliance on corpus-based methods. Such
investigations focus much more on the heterogeneity and variability of the data than on the
homogeneity