This book aims to disseminate at an international level a set of innovative studies whose descriptive and applied point of reference is the Catalan language. The volume constitutes a significant contribution to the field of intercultural pragmatics and also to a broad range of grammatical and cognitive issues which have been approached from the pragmatic perspective.

This volume brings together two highly researched but also highly controversial concepts, those of politeness and implicature. A theory of implicature as social action and im/politeness as social practice is developed that opens up new ways of examining the relationship between them. It constitutes a fresh look at the issues involved that redresses the current imbalance between social and pragmatic accounts of im/politeness.