The contributors to this volume tend to agree on one thing: semantic theory cannot retain its traditional purity, free of pragmatic contextual considerations. This claim provides the setting for various provocative approaches to a precise definition of pragmatics and its reconciliation with semantics--a collection of leading-edge work examining the semantics/pragmatics dispute in terms of a broad range of phenomena, showing how these issues reach from linguistics into a number of other fields, and examining the role of pragmatics in different forms of cross-cultural communication.