Acknowledgements

I am profoundly grateful to a group of friends and colleagues who have given considerable time to look at parts of this book: Trine Antonsen, Timothy Chan, Georg Gjøll, Eline Busk Gundersen, Alison Hall, Heine Holmen, Ingrid Lossius Falkum, Jonas Pfister, Dan Sperber, Chiara Tabet, Deirdre Wilson and Hiroyuki Uchida. Their comments and advice have made the book much better than it would otherwise have been. All remaining mistakes are my responsibility.

Thanks to my wife Jui Chu Hsu Allott for help with examples in Minnanyu and putonghua.

I would also like to thank Gurdeep Mattu and Colleen Coalter at Continuum, and Vladimir Žegarac, without whom this book would not exist.

My main debt in writing this book is to everyone I have learned from, directly or indirectly. I hope that I have represented their ideas accurately here. I was lucky enough to spend my formative years as a linguist at University College London and my way of thinking about pragmatics and linguistics reflects that. My thanks in particular to three people who are very clear influences on what I have written here: Robyn Carston, Neil Smith and, most of all, Deirdre Wilson. zVyiUF1n/sWph4+HpiygNyk4Vv20UhzrvlXKB4aW7G5LBbu5Aj44j492ORVLg1Z5