The aim of this paper is to look back on the way pragmatic inquiry has evolved and to assess some of the ways in which certain pragmatic questions have been formulated. This is a fairly wide remit, hence the need to confine to and to focus on proposals for a pragmatic theory of politeness. This is set against the background of how Austinian speech-act analysis has over the years given way to the notion of the ‘text act’, and how the Gricean cooperative principle has likewise gradually accommodated beyond- the-sentence phenomena such as the norms which govern entire actions, activity types and so on.