The four main topical strands of the conference are as follows:
(i) Pragmatics theories: neo-Gricean approaches, relevance theory, theory of mind, meaning, role of context, common ground, semantics-pragmatics interface, explicature, implicature, speech act theory, presuppositions, grammaticalization, im/politeness, etc.
(ii) Experimental pragmatics: models of language and meaning, experimental techniques, scalar implicatures, reference resolution, interpretation of figurative language, etc.
(iii) Intercultural, cross-cultural and societal aspects of pragmatics: research involving more than one language and culture, or varieties of one language, intercultural pragmatics, interlanguage pragmatics, variational pragmatics, social pragmatics, lingua franca, computer-mediated communication (CMC), bilinguals’ and heritage speakers’ language use, intercultural misunderstandings, effect of dual language and multilingual systems on the development and use of pragmatic skills, language of aggression and conflict, etc.
(iv) Applications: usage and corpus-based approaches, pragmatic competence, teachability and learnability of pragmatic skills, pragmatic variations within one language and across languages, developmental pragmatics, cyber pragmatics, etc.