ABSTRACT
When talking about 'interdisciplinarity' in linguistics and pragmatics, one often confuses these two concepts: the cross-disciplinary and the (true) interdisciplinary. To take an example from speech act theory: the interdisciplinary emerges as the need to localize the speech act in space and time, to 'contextualize' it in the widest possible sense of the term: local and temporal. A question that has pervaded linguistic debates from their very start is the problem of 'immanence', understood as the requirement to consider language as a scientific object, presenting itself 'as a self-sufficient totality, a structure sui generis'. Ferdinand de Saussure, by many considered the father of modern linguistics, used the now famous image of an express train to clarify his thoughts on language and how it works. In an interdisciplinary approach, pragmatics relies on and calls on the various sciences of human behavior to be incorporated in the quest for the total context.
