Introduction

The contributions collected in the volume examine a range of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communicative settings – such as healthcare services, TV interpreting, film dialogue, TED talks, academic peer-to-peer communication, student-teacher communication, and multilingual classrooms – and provide insights into the role played by linguistic resources and discursive strategies in contexts where participants pursue specific interactional/transactional goals. Each study illustrates pragmatic (i.e. context-dependent, goal-driven and/or goal-oriented) aspects of communication, and shows their direct relevance to second/foreign language pedagogy. The topics covered and the issues addressed fall within applied pragmatics, that is, pragmatically oriented linguistic analysis that accounts for interpersonal-transactional issues in real-life situated communication