Contrastive Pragmatics

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).

Maria de los Ángeles Gómez González, University of Santiago de Compostella, in Languages in Contrast Vol. 12:1 (2012), pag. 112-119:
The contributions in Contrastive Pragmatics indeed succeed in offering new insights into relevant long-standing issues while showing how contrastive linguistics and pragmatics may contribute to each other by discovering that, even between very closely related languages and cultural backgrounds, remarkable differences can emerge from the examination of naturally-occurring corpus data. Undoubtedly the questions raised in this collective volume will stimulate further inquiries and will help future researchers find answers to their queries.