This collection contains selected papers in pragmatics; some of the topics covered are social communication behaviors in tuberous sclerosis and autism, the pragmatic aspects of language of only children and second born children, overlapping in Cantonese conversation, the role of pragmatics in semantic change, shared knowledge as a performative and rhetorical category, the status of the principle of relevance in relevance theory, positions and position markers in conversational episodes containing sensitive topics, agreement and refusal messages in young French children, answering machine outgoing messages in comparison, tense-aspect controversy of the -ta and -ru forms in Japanese, teachers' interactional orientation to pupils' replies, situation-bound utterances from an interlanguage perspective, code-switching in reported speech, rhetorical effects in present-day English, implicit arguments in Hungarian, the interaction of power with status, age, and gender, professional conflict in 19th and 20th century academic writing, reexamination of Japanese "cooperative" communication style, opening telephone interactions in Greek, self-interruption and the restructuring of conversation, pragmatic functions of discourse markers in English and Japanese, conditional connectives at the semantics-pragmatics interface, and the language of interdependence in Japanese vertical relationships.