This volume brings together five papers offering cross-linguistic analyses of pragmatic markers involving modality, asupplemented by three book reviews on the same topic. The contrastive method, based on monolingual or translation corpora, does not only provide interesting insights about differences with respect to the semantics and the formal encoding of semantics between cognate elements in different languages, but also appears to be a very useful tool to refine the semantic analysis of markers within a given language. The reader will also discover among the results of the original empirical research collected in this volume insights that contribute to typological and theoretical issues surrounding pragmatic markers, such as the bottom-up identification of cross-linguistic pragmatic or discourse functions, the establishment of semantic maps and the formulation of hypotheses about implicational hierarchies in the diachronic development of pragmatic markers on the basis of synchronic evidence, especially in the framework of grammaticalization/pragmaticalization theory. This volume was orginally published as a special issue of 'Languages in Contrast' 10:2 (2010).