A subset of 15 intercultural pragmatics papers from the 2006 LAUD Symposium is presented in this volume. An impressive array of data is drawn from Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, South Jutish, Spanish, and Turkish participants. However, considering the diverse assortment of languages, purposes, and methodologies represented, comparative generalizations are more elusive.

In the section on discourse markers, Neff-van Aertselaer and Dafouz-Milne provide convincing support for their claim that transfer was the primary factor among novice writers for the observed underuse of logical connectors and overuse of sequencers. Thus, exposure to metadiscourse categories and instruction can be linked to increased awareness of audience expectations. In the section that highlights classroom discourse, Fredsted offers the plausible suggestion that the mishmash (i.e., mixed) code type is more commonly observed in border regions because code choices there are primarily geared toward two audiences (bilingual group insiders and outsiders). The third, and most coherent, section focuses on requests. Otcu and Zeyrek’s multimethod findings support other recent claims on proficiency and speech act production. Schauer’s multimedia elicitation task represents cutting-edge research methodology for oral speech acts. It is hoped that other researchers will consider similar groundbreaking, multimethod studies instead of overrelying on the somewhat-maligned written discourse completion task.

This volume is most appropriate for specialists in pragmatics with graduate-level training: It is not for the typical undergraduate. The last two sections connect more directly with SLA concepts and contemporary second language pragmatics methodologies. An in-depth discussion of the link between contrastive pragmatics and SLA would have been useful: It is not always the case that research that involves intercultural pragmatics or contrasts between two languages or dialects holds interesting SLA implications. Only about half of the authors explicitly outlined the implications of their research for SLA, whereas far too many left the reader to guess what the implications might be. Despite these limitations, this collection of papers offers a number of valuable contributions from some of the top researchers in first and second language pragmatics.