Linguists survey the current directions of research in intercultural pragmatics, a specialty that investigates how the language system is put to use in social encounters between people who have different first languages, communicate in a common language, and usually represent different cultures. They cover linguistic and cognitive aspects, social-cultural aspects, and discourse and stylistics. Among their topics are the semantics and pragmatics of causal connectives, simultaneous speech in American English and Spanish telephone closings, some insights into variational pragmatics in Chinese from an empirical study, the evaluative function of cohesive devices in three political texts, and zoo-pragmatics studying performative acts among animals. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
