The purpose of these introductory remarks is to complement the following case studies by Ferenc Kiefer on majd ‘later (on), sooner or later’, Attila Péteri on hadd ‘let’, and Ildikó Vaskó on persze ‘of course’. What we will do is sketch a number of what we consider promising theoretical developments that have a bearing on the issues raised in these studies. In a section addressing issues of form (section 2), we discuss “cartographic” approaches to adverb(ial) hierarchies and the clausal “left periphery”, as well as pragmatic markers within clause types. In a section focusing on issues of interpretation (section 3), we deal with pragmatic markers from the perspective of “projective meaning” and “conversational moves”