Drawing on an impressive array of research methods, the 12 experts in this remarkable book push the fields of Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics in directions both qualitative and quantitative. How? In Pragmatics, the speaker is often depicted as fully rational yet living in an asocial world where the only tasks of communication are cognitive. Speakers deliberately select from sets of linguistic resources, obeying perceived discourse and listener-based constraints so as to best produce intended responses in the listener. If deliberate, no statistical variation should occur. Also, the listener as active socially-situated participant in negotiations of meaning is only vaguely present. Two issues emerge: the social listener as meaning maker and variation either of different forms to create similar meanings or of differing meanings mapped to similar forms. By pushing in these directions, the researchers here creatively push the envelope not only of Pragmatics but also of Variationist Sociolinguistics.

- Richard Cameron, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA,

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in pragmatic variation in the first language setting. This volume very admiringly furthers the empirical basis and the theoretical and methodological discussion on this setting, while also taking up the investigation of pragmatic variation in the second language context. Taken together, the book offers many new and captivating insights, thoughts and ideas on pragmatic variation. It is a must-read for pragmatists, sociolinguists and second language researchers researching in the area.

- Anne Barron, Leuphana University Lüneburg,