From a socio-cultural perspective on pragmatics, this volume presents a broad view of how social and cultural factors influence language use. The volume covers a broad range of topics within the field of sociopragmatics. This subfield comprises sociolinguistic studies that emphasize how pragmatic and discourse features differ according to macro-sociological variables such as age, gender, class and region (variational pragmatics), and discourse/conversation analytical studies exploring variation according to the activity engaged in by the participants and the identities displayed as relevant in interaction. The volume also includes studies in linguistic pragmatics with a more general socio-cultural focus, including global and intercultural communication, politeness, critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology. Each article presents the state-of-the-art of the topic at hand, as well as new research.