We have recently seen a broadening of pragmatics to new areas and to the study of more than one language. This is illustrated by the present volume on Contrastive Pragmatics which brings together a number of articles originally presented at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference in Göteborg in 2007. The contributions deal with pragmatic phenomena such as speech acts, discourse markers and modality in different language pairs using theoretical approaches such as politeness theory, Conversation Analysis, Appraisal Theory, grammaticalization and cultural textology. Also discourse practices and genres may differ across cultures as illustrated by the study of TV news shows in different countries. Contrastive pragmatics also includes the comparative study of pragmatic phenomena from a foreign language perspective, a new area with implications for language teaching and intercultural communication. The contributions to this volume were originally published in Languages in Contrast 9:1 (2009).

A collection of papers on Contrastive Pragmatics, involving research on interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives with a focus on second language acquisition contexts.

We have recently seen a broadening of pragmatics to new areas and to the study of more than one language. This is illustrated by the present volume on Contrastive Pragmatics which brings together a number of articles originally presented at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference in Göteborg in 2007. The contributions deal with pragmatic phenomena such as speech acts, discourse markers and modality in different language pairs using theoretical approaches such as politeness theory, Conversation Analysis, Appraisal Theory, grammaticalization and cultural textology. Also discourse practices and genres may differ across cultures as illustrated by the study of TV news shows in different countries. Contrastive pragmatics also includes the comparative study of pragmatic phenomena from a foreign language perspective, a new area with implications for language teaching and intercultural communication. The contributions to this volume were originally published in Languages in Contrast 9:1 (2009).

This volume deals with a variety of pragmatic issues involved in cross-language and interlanguage studies as well as second-language acquisition and cross-cultural studies. Part I contains papers dealing with general issues stemming from contrastive work, for example, the question of tertium comparationis and its place in the development of contrastive studies as well as the applicability of generalizations proposed by speech-act theorists in contrasting concrete languages and cultures. The second part tackles a number of pragmatic issues involved in second-language learners' written productions, classroom discourse, as well as more general questions pertaining to pragmatic errors and learners' interlanguage. An Index of terms and an Index of names complete the volume.

This book provides the first comprehensive account of English-German pragmatic contrasts in written discourse and their effects on English-German translations. The novel and multi-dimensional corpus-based studies of business communication and popular science writing presented in this book combine quantitative and qualitative approaches and focus on the use of evaluative adjectives and epistemic modal markers. They provide empirical evidence that English and German differ in systematic ways and that translations, while being adapted to target audience’s preferences to a large extent, are clearly susceptible to source language interference when it comes to more fine-grained differences. The book discusses which general factors determine the degree of impact of source language features on translations and also comments on the possibility of source language influence on target language norms via translations. The book is of interest to researchers and students in a variety of fields, such as pragmatics, translation studies, genre analysis and stylistics.

Why is a raven like a writing-desk? The concept of similarity lies at the heart of this new book on contrastive analysis. Similarity judgements depend partly on properties of the objects being compared, and partly on what the person judging considers to be relevant to the assessment; similarity thus has both objective and subjective aspects. The author shows how contrastive analysis and translation theory make use of the concept in different ways, and explains how it relates to the problematic notions of equivalence and tertium comparationis. The book then develops a meaning-based contrastive methodology, and outlines one theory of semantic structure which can be used in this methodology. The approach is illustrated with four sample studies covering different kinds of phenomena in some European languages. The final part of the book proposes an extension of the theoretical framework to cover contrastive rhetoric: the aim is to suggest a unified approach linking aspects of semantics, pragmatics and rhetoric. Keywords: similarity, contrastive analysis, functional grammar, semantics, rhetoric, translation.

The present volume is a collection of papers on Contrastive Pragmatics, involving research on interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives with a focus on second language acquisition contexts. The subdiscipline of pragmatics is seen from a multilingual and multicultural perspective thus contributing to an emerging field of study, i.e. intercultural pragmatics which can be made fruitful to second language teaching/learning and contrastive analysis. The book is an important contribution to general linguistics, pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, second language acquisition, as well as minority issues in multilingual settings.