Developing Contrastive Pragmatics ― Interlanguage and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Grown from those presented at a March 2006 conference on intercultural pragmatics held in Landau, Germany, these 15 papers use linguistic, socio-cultural and cognitive approaches to promote language competence and the study of language acquisition. Focusing on everyday multilingual interactions in language, including building meaning in online communication, these articles describe systematic research into the teaching and learning of second (or more) foreign languages. Topics include intercultural pragmatics and discourse markers, including socio-cultural conceptualization, cultural scripts, metadiscourse markers, reframing one's experiences in the classroom, strategies of indirect complaint, bilingual informal discussion, learning with humor, and six papers detailing learning how to make requests. This would serve well as a readers in a undergraduate or graduate course on pragmatics as well as a professional resource. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Martin Putz, Universitat Koblenz-Landau, Landau, Germany; JoAnne Neff-van Aertslaer, Universidad Complutense, Madrid, Spain.