This book is devoted to various explorations of how linguistics and pragmatics together can shed light on the contrasts between languages in their discourse-cultural settings.

It arises from presentations and discussions held at the Fourth International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC4), which took place in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain from 20 to 23 September 2005.1 The twelve chapters analyse linguistic phenomena across different languages, taking into account their co-texts as well as the socio-cultural contexts in which they arise.

The first two sections consider various questions of information structure, discourse analysis and lexis; each chapter is concerned in some way with the interplay between, on the one hand, grammatical and lexical organization and, on the other, the contexts in which utterances are used and texts emerge. The final chapters of the book consider how new techniques of contrastive linguistics and pragmatics are contributing to the primary field of application for contrastive analysis, language teaching and learning.