These volumes contain selected papers from the Second International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, in September 2000. They include papers on negation, temporality, modality, evidentiality, eventualities, grammar and conceptualization, grammaticalization, metaphor, cross-cultural pragmatics and speech acts and the semantics-pragmatics boundary. There are contributions by, amongst many others, Les Bruce, Ilinca Crainiceanu, Thorstein Fretheim, Saeko Fukushima, Ronald Geluykens, Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, Klaus von Heusinger, K. M. Jaszczolt, Susumu Kubo, Akiko Kurosawa, Eva Lavric, Didier Maillat, Márta Maleczki, Steve Nicolle, Sergei Tatevosov, L. M. Tovena, Jacqueline Visconti and Krista Vogelberg. Table of contentsGrammaticalization Distal aspects in Bantu languages Steve Nicolle 3 From temporal to conditional: Italian qualora vs. English whenever Jacqueline Visconti 23 Then — adverbial pro-form or inference particle: A comparative study of English, Ewe, Hungarian, and Norwegian Thorstein Fretheim, Stella Boateng and Ildikó Vaskó 51 The polysemy of the Swedish verb komma ‘come’: A view from translation corpora Åke Viberg 75 Metaphor in contrast Studying metaphors using a multilingual corpus Kay Wikberg 109 Cross-language metaphors: Parents and children, love, marriage and divorce in the European family Andreas Musolff 125 A contrastive cognitive perspective on Malay and English figurative language Jonathan Charteris-Black 141 Metaphorical expressions in English and Spanish stock market journalistic texts Anna Espunya and Patrick Zabalbeascoa 159 Cross-cultural pragmatics and speech acts Directions of regulation in speech act theory Susumu Kubo 183 On Japanese ne and Chinese ba Mutsuko Endo Hudson and Ronald Geluykens 197 ‘I am asking for a pen’: Framing of requests in black South African English Luanga A. Kasanga 213 Cultural scripts for French and Romanian thanking behaviour Tine Van Hecke 237 Sociocultural variation in native and interlanguage complaints Ronald Geluykens and Bettina Kraft 251 A cross-cultural study of requests: The case of British and Japanese undergraduates Saeko Fukushima 263 uestions as indirect requests in Russian and Czech Michael Betsch 277 The language of love in Melanesia: A study of positive emotions Les Bruce 291 Everyday rituals in Polish and English Ewa Jakubowska 331 A question of time? uestion types and speech act shifts from a historical-contrastive perspective: Some examples from Old Spanish and Middle English Verena Jung and Angela Schrott 345 The contrasts between contrasters: What discussion groups can tell us about discourse pragmatics Piibi-Kai Kivik and Krista Vogelberg 373 The semantics/pragmatics boundary: Theory and applications Cross-linguistic implementations of specificity Klaus von Heusinger 405 The semantics–pragmatics interface: The case of grounding Esam N. Khalil 423 On translating ‘What is said’: Tertium comparationis in contrastive semantics and pragmatics K.M. Jaszczolt 441 Translation equivalents as empirical data for semantic/pragmatic theory Bergljot Behrens and Cathrine Fabricius Hansen 463