ABSTRACT
Intercultural pragmatics is a field of research characterised by a concern with language use in discourse between members of different mother tongues and cultures. To understand the nature of intercultural pragmatics as a distinctive field of inquiry, it is first necessary to set it off from two other well-known, adjacent research paradigms: cross-cultural pragmatics and interlanguage pragmatics. This chapter introduces the areas that have shaped and continue to shape intercultural pragmatic research and then focuses on a perspective of current work in this field that is on lingua franca pragmatics. Another important contribution of historical pragmatics to the field of intercultural pragmatics is the deeper insights it may afford into processes of linguistic variation and change. The major issues discussed in the field of intercultural workplace communication are cultural differences between the interactants, the dominant role of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in the international workplace, and the 'normality' of international workplace interactions.
