The topic of investor protection has occupied investors, regulators, academics, and courts since at least the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The topic, however, exploded in importance after the 2008 financial crisis and the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme of the same year. In addition, the substantial growth in the equity markets and the surge in retail investors’ exposure to stocks have sparked questions over whether regulators are doing all they can to protect investors.

As we approach the twentieth anniversary of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (Sarbanes–Oxley), which sought to prevent future frauds such as Enron and WorldCom, it makes sense to revisit one of the statute’s most controversial provisions. Section 307 of Sarbanes–Oxley gave the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sweeping authority to establish “minimum standards of professional conduct” that would enable it to discipline lawyers “appearing and practicing before the [SEC] in any way in the representation of [public] issuers.”1 Specifically, section 307 ordered the SEC to implement regulations requiring lawyers who encounter “evidence of material violation” of law to report such evidence up the corporate ladder to the full board or an appropriate committee thereof, if necessary, to ensure that “appropriate remedial measures or sanctions” are taken.2

By many accounts, investors, particularly retail investors, are a beleaguered bunch. The reasons for this are numerous. The global COVID-19 pandemic that has caused suffering for millions of people and depleted global economic value is only the most palpable among them. Other significant concerns have persisted for decades. One of them is that the fees investors must pay to mutual fund managers and securities brokers are generally too high, depriving investors from realizing the full benefit of the appreciation of their investments or, worse, depleting the investments’ value. A second is that, regardless of how much an investor loses in fees, she is likely to lose also as a result of the particular investment strategies by which her investments are managed, which often are unable to generate returns exceeding market returns.

Israel has more companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange than any country outside the United States, save China.2 At the same time, a growing number of US companies, especially from the real-estate sector, are raising capital on Israel’s Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.3 Therefore, it is important for both US and Israeli public investors to study how the laws, regulations, and standards of the other jurisdiction protect them from expropriation.

The rise of mutual funds has been a defining trend in finance. Unlike many financial innovations, they have greatly improved the financial well-being of retail investors, many of whom invest in mutual funds to save for retirement.2 Over the last forty years, the bulk of retail investors have shifted from owning stocks directly in companies to holding them through these financial intermediaries.3 This is a foremost example of economic theory impacting behavior and bettering peoples’ lives. Finance theory teaches the value of a diversified portfolio. Mutual funds offer diversification otherwise unobtainable to typical investors. Finance theory also teaches that investors, on average, cannot earn returns in excess of the market.4 Through passively managed funds (i.e., index funds), investors can own a portfolio that simply tracks an index of securities. This frees them from fruitless stock-picking and the unnecessary fees finance professionals charge for it.5

Any system of investor protection rests on a theory of which investors to protect. Policy inevitably demands tradeoffs between distinct constituencies with divergent needs. Institutional investors are quite different from individual investors. A billionaire investing through a family office has distinct concerns from a middle-class investor. Tastes and preferences for regulation may differ, too, even within an apparently homogenous category. One retail investor may have unusually high tolerance for risk, or may enjoy day-trading and speculating, even at the expense of higher returns. Another retail investor may be focused on saving for retirement, have little interest in the task of picking investments, and primarily want oversight and protection from the perils of the market.2

This chapter examines theoretical understandings and research findings related to the notion of pragmatic awareness within the field of intercultural language learning, highlighting important points of connection with the field of intercultural pragmatics. It first presents a critical overview of dominant theoretical understandings of pragmatic awareness within the field of language learning and then delineates key assumptions about the relationship between pragmatics and culture that have informed work on pragmatic awareness with a distinctly intercultural orientation. This discussion brings into focus a number of ways that sociocultural and socio-cognitive perspectives within intercultural pragmatics have contributed to an enlarged understanding of the nature of pragmatic interpretation and the close links between pragmatics and moral judgments. The chapter then addresses key findings and perspectives from empirical studies on pragmatic awareness within the field of intercultural language learning, highlighting implications for the field of intercultural pragmatics and areas for future development.

This chapter presents some of the most significant studies in the history of intercultural pragmatics (IP) research that have applied the methodology of corpus pragmatics (CP). In fact, the use of corpora has been an essential contribution to IP in crucial areas such as formulaic language, context and common ground, or politeness research, among others, with the conviction that CP has redefined the conceptualization of pragmatic competence in a globalized world. The chapter follows a topical structure in which critical areas of research from an intercultural and corpus pragmatic perspective are addressed, like the role of the lingua franca; the use of academic, professional, and scientific language; cross-cultural studies; prosody, multimodality, and computer-mediated communication and learner's corpora. In all these areas, the chapter highlights the significant research concerns and achievements that have helped to shape IP as an essential discipline in current linguistic theory. A final section with conclusions and ideas for further research will ensue.

Relevance Theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory devoted to utterance interpretation. Its main assumption is that linguistic communication is guided by the communicative principle of relevance, which states that the addressee is invited to take the speaker’s contribution as optimally relevant. In intracultural communication, the crucial point is to understand how communication succeeds, since its success depends not on a complete linguistic decoding but rather on accessing the relevant contextual assumptions; that is, the assumptions that are closest to the speaker’s informative intention. This chapter’s first aim is to elucidate both how Relevance Theory is included in Grice’s legacy, and how it diverges from Grice. Its second aim is to discuss the place of Relevance Theory in pragmatics today, and more specifically to explore whether Relevance Theory makes different predictions than do neo-Gricean approaches. Its third aim is to give insights into Relevance Theory’s contributions to the intercultural pragmatics agenda, and in particular to discuss how Relevance Theory converges with but also diverges from the intercultural pragmatics paradigm initiated by Kecskes in 2014.

Intercultural rhetoric and intercultural pragmatics are two linguistically based fields with many principles and processes in common: both examine the use of language systems in encounters between people with different L1s, coming from different cultures, but communicating in a common language. This chapter provides an overview of intercultural rhetoric highlighting the ways in which intercultural pragmatics and intercultural rhetoric parallel and complement one another. The chapter begins with a description of the evolution of intercultural rhetoric from contrastive rhetoric drawing particular attention to the shift to understanding culture dynamic, understanding the importance of analyzing texts in context, and drawing greater attention to the use of negotiation and accommodation. The chapter then explores the influences that intercultural rhetoric and intercultural pragmatics have exerted on English for Specific Purposes, English for Academic Purposes, and second language teaching, particularly noting the ways the two fields have complemented and paralleled one another and suggesting ways the fields can serve as a bridge across chasms that have formed in linguistics, second language writing, English as a Lingua Franca, and translingualism. The chapter ends with a short discussion of the future of intercultural rhetoric and suggestions for future trends.

Default interpretation is crucial for the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) and intercultural pragmatics. Participants of intercultural interactions represent different speech communities and cultures, so defaultness can hardly work the way it does in L1. The cognitive mechanism is the same, but the result is different. As interlocutors in intercultural encounters belong to different speech communities, they share limited core common ground of the target language (English), which is the basis for relatively similar default interpretations in L1. Research in intercultural communication and L2 use (e.g. House 2002; Cieslicka 2007; Kecskes 2010) demonstrated the priority of literal meaning in both production and comprehension. Literal meanings of lexical units serve as core common ground for interlocutors with different L1 backgrounds when they communicate in English. In order for us to understand how default interpretation works in intercultural interactions, first we need to get to know how defaultness occurs in L1. Giora’s study will help us do that.