The past few decades have witnessed a veritable research boom in interlanguage, cross-cultural, and contrastive pragmatics, as well as in the area of (im)politeness, resulting in a widening perspective with regard to data types, objects of inquiry, and analytical methods.

The present edition takes stock of recent developments in the field, as well as offering a selection of empirical papers that explore new research avenues, with a focus on different types of variation in English, on the use of a variety of different data collection procedures, and on a variety of face-threatening acts. 

In the first part of this collection, it is discussed how these three areas of pragmatic research relate to, and differ from, each other, as well as examining a number of methodological issues relevant for studying pragmatic variation. The second part brings together a number of papers on interlanguage English, with an emphasis on the benefits and drawbacks of using controlled elicitation data. The contributions in the third and final  section focus on contrastive and cross-cultural pragmatics, with special reference to the use of more naturalistic data.

PART I: METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

Ronald Geluykens & Ilka Flöck

Analyzing Pragmatic Variation: An Introduction

Ronald Geluykens

Methodology Revisited: An Evaluation of Research Methods in Pragmatics 

Ilka Flöck & Ronald Geluykens

Comparing Empirical Methodologies in Pragmatics: A Meta-Analysis of Research on Directive Speech Acts

PART II: INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATICS AND CONTROLLED ELICITATION DATA

Ronald Geluykens & Bettina Kraft

Social, Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Variation in Complaints: The Usefulness of DCTs for Quantitative Variational Analysis

Christina Peters & Ronald Geluykens

Pragmatic Transfer in Native and Interlanguage Refusals: A Contrastive Analysis of English and German

Hanna Agena & Ronald Geluykens

Pragmatic Transfer and Social Variation in Interlanguage Requests 

Yan Jiang & Jean-Marc Dewaele

Self-reported Frequency of Swearing in Chinese Dialects, Putonghua, and English in the Speech of Chinese Multilingual University Students

PART III: CONTRASTIVE PRAGMATICS AND NATURAL(ISTIC) DATA

Katharina Heisterkamp & Ronald Geluykens

Responses to Thanks in Irish English: A Comparison of Elicited and Naturalistic Data

Jill-Dean Rose & Ilka Flöck

Explicit Apologies in Fictional Telecinematic Discourse

Alena Jansen & Ilka Flöck

Apologies and Corpus Pragmatics: Comparing a Form-to-Function and Function-to-Form Approach in SPICE-Ireland

Ilka Flöck

Requests in Informal Conversations: A Contrastive Study of English and German