Although Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Strawson, John Austin and Paul Grice emphasized in the 1950s that observation of the usage of natural languages should be the privileged object of inquiry for philosophy of language, this idea was not really taken into account and put into practice by linguists until forty years later. This situation could be described as “paradoxical”, since appealing to usage is in itself a sine qua non condition for the elaboration of any linguistic theory, yet it remains true that the real consideration of usage through linguistic approaches at the end of the eighties resulted in upsetting the well-established order between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Understood to be the cause behind the change in linguistic forms and no longer as the updating of a system, the observation of usage questioned the Chomskian postulate on the autonomy of grammar and this theoretical break brought a paradigm shift taking full advantage of the semantic and pragmatic properties of the utterances in usage to construct syntax. The aim of this communication is to propose an analysis of the theoretical changes induced by usage-based approaches to language. To do this, we will draw up a map of these changes and this study will lead us to show that the reciprocal restructuring of the domains of syntax, semantics and pragmatics also resulted in the revision of pivotal concepts within these three disciplinary fields. We will then highlight the domains, such as learning or the language-memory link, that usage-based approaches can more easily explain. The two previous studies will then offer us the opportunity to clarify why when usage becomes the privileged object of inquiry language can then be conceived as a natural and social system in continual evolution.