Chapter 3 presents a comprehensive way of analysing and describing interaction, serving as a model for the descriptions offered in the rest of the book. In the descriptive system explicated in this chapter, we approach interaction through units of various size, including expressions, illocutionary acts and Types of Talk representing discourse. The system presented in this chapter was not derived in a top-down manner, but ratheremerged as an outcome of extensive empirical research.

In Chapter 7, we provide an introduction into the highest unit in this grammar, discourse, through the analytic unit of Types of Talk. Types of Talk consist of interactional structures, into which speech acts can be slotted. We propose an inventory of speech acts by means of which one can systematise Types of Talk.

Chapter 8 presents a case study of an important Type of Talk, namely Opening Talk. The chapter illustrates why the acquisition of speech acts and related Types of Talk is often challenging for learners of English. We report on experiments conducted with Chinese learners of English.

In Chapter 12, we engage in the study of the unit of speech act by contrastively examining the ways in which historical letters are conventionally closed in three different linguacultures: Chinese, German and British English. The ‘cross-cultural’ aspect of pragmatics does not only involve the study of language use in geographically different cultures – we may as well go back in history and compare language use in various historical periods within a particular linguaculture. Furthermore, we may also combine research on spatially distant linguacultures with that of diachronically distant ones. In this chapter we do exactly this, by conducting a contrastive analysis of typologically ‘closer’ and typologically more ‘distant’ linguacultures. By focusing on historical data, we highlight the overlap between cross-cultural pragmatics and the field of historical pragmatics. The chapter shows how our speech act coding scheme outlined in Chapter 8 can be put into use in data analysis.

In Chapter 9 we examine discourse, the highest analytic unit. First, we argue that there is a major difference between the ways in which ‘discourse’ is investigated in cross-cultural pragmatics and some other fields such as Critical Discourse Analysis. To highlight differences between cross-cultural pragmatic research on discourse and Critical Discourse Analysis, we distinguish the term ‘cda’ from CDA, as an acronym from ‘contrastive discourse analysis’. We point out that discourse in cross-cultural pragmatics can be rigorously investigated through the logic of empirical research proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper. Following this, we examine various pragmatic units of analysis which are, at the same time, components of discourse itself, by arguing that discourse can only be approached rigorously across linguacultures if it is broken down into components, that is, if we systematise the units constituting data representing discourse. We also show how discourse as a departure point for analysis can be approached in cross-cultural pragmatics.