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.weiterlesen