ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of three salient pragmatic phenomena, i.e. speech acts, politeness and implicature, teasing out their significant role in the construal, translation and reception of audiovisual texts. It presents implicature is treated as a sub-type of non-conventional indirectness. The chapter outlines Grice's pioneering study of implicature. It focuses on the cognitive psychological perspective of relevance theory. Relevance theory is equipped with the conceptual tools for understanding context selection. Pragmatics as a field has bloomed over the second half of the twentieth century. Several trends have emerged and developed, such as philosophical pragmatics, cognitive pragmatics, interactive pragmatics and societal pragmatics or pragmalinguistics. Intercultural pragmatics and cross-cultural pragmatics have made significant contributions to the field of intercultural communication. From a purely cross-cultural pragmatics perspective, it could be tested whether politeness norms in different cultures actually govern the audiovisual translator's behaviour.
