The term contrastive pragmatics is usually reserved for synchronic comparisons between two, or a small number of, co-existent language usage systems, and mostly the impetus comes from teaching- or translation-related concerns. The author uses the term in this sense, and thus defines the confines of this contribution. It will be clear, however, that contrastive pragmatics in this sense includes most of what is generally called cross-cultural pragmatics. The author’s terminology thus differs from the one suggested by Kraft and Geluykens (eds.) (2007), who would use cross-cultural pragmatics as a cover term for a range of phenomena covered by contrastive pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, and interlanguage pragmatics. Schneider (2010) suggests a distinction (based on one borrowed from Thomas 1981 and Leech 1983) according to which ‘contrastive pragmatics’ could be said to deal with pragmalinguistic aspects, while ‘cross-cultural pragmatics’ would be dealing with sociopragmatic aspects. For the present purposes, the author will not maintain that distinction. It is important to keep in mind that the contrastive paradigm implies comparison across languages/cultures, which no doubt contributes to an understanding of intercultural processes, but that for a more complete understanding of the complexities of intercultural communication, comparison can never be enough, since ‘systems’ that meet get adapted in the process, so that also interactional data must be studied directly. Contrastive pragmatics finds its origin, not surprisingly, in a much older tradition of contrastive linguistics. Fillmore’s (1984) engagement with contrastive pragmatics starts from the following take on pragmatics: The data for pragmatics are the linking of sentences with the contexts of use in which ‘performances’ of them are welcome and fitting, and the evaluation of the nature of the fit between the sentence and its contexts. Precisely because the notion ‘context’ includes so much, attempts to correlate particular linguistic choices with specific aspects of context are so difficult (Fillmore 1984: 127). He goes on to distinguish between what he calls ‘large facts’ (such as politeness systems, patterns of indirectness, patterns of rhetorical organization of discourse, etc.) and ‘small facts,’ which he further characterizes as “things that need to be learned one at a time.” He then decides to concentrate on small facts only, i.e. ‘listable pragmatic practices’ some of which do not ‘translate’ well. He concludes by saying that ‘small’ facts, requiring, for their contrastive analysis, attention to the entire contents of the ‘context’ box, are often instances of “‘larger’ practices by which two languages differ more seriously” (Fillmore 1984: 134) and which may be as difficult to describe as cultures. Fillmore’s formulation was not even the earliest. Not only did it coincide with Oleksy (1984), but it was at least preceded by Gleason (1968), Sajavaara (1977), and by Riley’s (1979) “Towards a contrastive pragmalinguistics.” Riley claims that “Contrastive Analysis without a pragmalinguistic dimension is inadequate” (1979: 57). He proposes as a basis for contrastive analysis a ‘model of discourse’ involving meaning as a construct of behavior (the ‘act of communication’ of which the speech act is one possible realization), illocutions, and non-verbal communicative behavior. Another attempt was made in Oleksy (1984) to come up, tentatively, with a general model for pragmatic contrastive analysis. Oleksy advocates a focus on the ‘communicative act,’ incorporating a locutionary component (the proposition expressed in the utterance, not just the sentence), an illocutionary component (traditional speech acts with their sincerity conditions and their multiple realization forms), a pragmatico-contrastive component (community/culture-based restrictions on the use of elements from the speech act repertoire), and an interactive component. The overall purpose is“handling matters pertaining to the understanding of how speakers across languages manipulate linguistic expressions to perform different societal tasks” (Oleksy 1984: 362). Already at an early stage, different shades of contrastive pragmatic analysis vied for attention, and they kept doing so, as appears from the contents of numerous collective volumes that have appeared since under the common label of contrastive pragmatics (e.g. Oleksy ed. 1989, Jaszczolt and Turner eds. 1996, and Aijmer ed. 2009, to name just a few milestones). Given the popularity of speech act theory, spurred by Searle’s (1969) Speech Acts, during the formative years of the developing field of contrastive pragmatics, it is not surprising that a wide array of contrastive studies emerged that concentrated on speech acts. At a more abstract level, the speech-act-theoretical notion of the ‘illocution’ was an important point of orientation for attempts to construct models of pragmatic contrastive analysis, as in Riley (1979) and Oleksy (1984). More concretely, numerous contrastive studies of individual speech act types emerged. The best-known endeavor in the area of contrastive speech act studies, however, is the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP), originally formulated by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984), and with major output in Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (eds.) (1989). With CCSARP, an international team of researchers set out to investigate cross-cultural and intralingual variation in two specific speech acts, namely requests and apologies. The CCSARP project was a major contribution in a badly needed attempt to get away from a strongly Anglo-centered approach to verbal behavior. Probably the main result was the observation that there are cross-cultural differences in interactional style. Yet it was also found that some situational parameters seem to lead to similar strategies across some of the investigated languages, while others lead to divergent patterns.The CCSARP project has been mainly criticized because of the use of Discourse Completion Tests as its main data-gathering tool. Therefore, the questionnaire data were supplemented with ethnographically collected data by some of the researchers involved in the project. Recently the value of Discourse Completion Tests has been re-asserted, for instance by Labben (2016). The author likes to point at the contrastive lexical-semantic work in Verschueren (1985), in which lexicalized linguistic action notions in English and in Dutch are compared for the semantic fields of silence, lying, directives, and conversational routines. This metapragmatic research was carried out on the assumption that insight into the conceptualization of speech act categories (or, more widely, verbal behavior categories) was another necessary empirical supplement to the speech-act-theoretical approach. From the very start in the early 1980s, discourse and conversation were as much at the forefront of contrastive pragmatic research as speech acts. As early as 1977, Kari Sajavaara held a plea for a communicative approach to contrastive linguistics, which was more specifically advocated as contrastive discourse analysis in Sajavaara, Lehtonen and Korpimies (1980). They were consciously looking at language as a dynamic communication tool and as social behavior, more than as a system. This is only a short step away from Gumperz’ Discourse Strategies (1982), where the intercultural consequences of comparable forms of interference are analyzed: slight deviations from expected patterns in pronunciation (e.g. intonation) may cause significant misunderstandings because they are processed on the basis of mere habits of interpretation. Many other scholars have published work that fits the label contrastive discourse and/or conversation analysis. A major contrastive project, comparable in scope to CCSARP, was the so-called PIXI project – the Pragmatics of Italian/English Crosscultural Interaction (Aston ed. 1988, Anderson et al. 1990). This research had a clearly language-pedagogical aim, but was consciously moving away from the use of planned or scripted dialogues in teaching. In contrast to CCSARP (experimenting with predefined and pre-interpreted context, and with a focus on sentence-length utterance units), PIXI was in search of ‘authentic’ interaction, ‘natural’ data, clearly in line with the growing concern with real day-to-day interaction as studied in ethnomethodology and the burgeoning field of conversation analysis. Straightforward contrastive conversation analysis is abundantly present ever since. Meanwhile, dominant approaches to contrastive discourse analysis have changed significantly as a result of rapidly evolving research tools and techniques. Thus they now tend to be strongly corpus-based (with parallel corpora), and methodologically mostly oriented from forms to functions (because of searchability in corpora). Comparative or contrastive discourse analysis in applied linguistics, taking a language-pedagogical perspective, and paying special attention to translation problems, appears in the shape of ‘contrastive textology’ in Hartmann (1980). Hartmann’s main objective is the study of parallel texts. Without using the term textology, also Enkvist (1984) relates contrastive linguistics to text linguistics and Enkvist further takes the step towards the then-classical literature on language typologies (e.g. Greenberg). While Li and Thompson, as they should for typology, use a wide range of very different languages, Enkvist suggests that extending the approach to closely related languages, in the tradition of contrastive linguistics, would also yield interesting differences.Enkvist ends up with a plea for taking the perspective of a ‘processual linguistics’ for purposes of contrastive analysis, taking into account strategies, plans, processes. This clearly turns contrastive (text) linguistics into a thoroughly pragmatic enterprise. Another tradition, which Chesterman (1998) brings together with contrastive discourse analysis and contrastive textology in a common basket of ‘contrastive functional analysis’ is contrastive rhetoric. Attention to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural rhetorical variability has developed in two different directions. Clearly, typological differences in preferential recourse to specific language resources interact with rhetorical strategies in the construction of discourse, hence in the generation of meaning. More than half of the contributions to Connor, Nagelhout and Rozycki’s edited volume on Contrastive Rhetoric(2008) deal with contrastive genre studies, often presented as intercultural. Academic language has long been a favorite topic for contrastive genre studies. Another all-time favorite is business communication of various kinds. Yet another genre-oriented tradition is contrastive media research, as in Hauser and Luginbühl (eds.) (2012). Contrastive media research does not necessarily require an international focus. Finally, it is worth referring to Barron’s (2012) contrastive study of public information messages, showing e.g. that the availability of different language resources produces significant variations in what is intended to be the ‘same’ message. From the late 1970’s onwards, Janicki (1979, 1984, 1991) championed the idea of a contrastive sociolinguistics. Though this was not his intention, his efforts remind us that in fact all sociolinguistics is contrastive. Later usage of the term, however, as in Hellinger and Ammon (eds.) (1996), covers a wide range of phenomena, from those that would have been intended by Janicki, to more standard sociolinguistic topics, as well as the kinds of cross-cultural issues discussed earlier as forms of contrastive speech act studies or contrastive discourse analysis. In addition to the foregoing trends or traditions, the term contrastive pragmatics is also applicable to the contrastive study of pragmatic aspects of grammatical phenomena. A more general point of grammatical importance from a contrastive pragmatic perspective is brought home by Delin, Hartley and Scott (1996). They illustrate that contrastive pragmatics at a text level can go far beyond simple text comparison by systematically paying attention to the choices made in different languages from a range of syntactic resources available for specific tasks. Finally, contrastive pragmatic work has been done in the development of grammatical theories such as construction grammar. Needless to say that there is an abundance of contrastive research on popular pragmatic topics such as metaphor, humor, and politeness. Much work in these fields is in fact inherently contrastive. As pointed out before, much contrastive pragmatic research was prompted by practical concerns, in particular in relation to language teaching and translation. What these concerns have in common is the question about the extent to which utterances in different languages can be seen as equivalent. This observation immediately implies the main methodological worry one needs to cope with: how can equivalence be evaluated? In most cases, judgements of equivalence are said to require a tertium comparationis, a standard or frame of reference by which to ‘measure’ comparability. For contrastive pragmatics, a tertium comparationis is bound to be functional, i.e. usually to be captured in terms of a combination of formal and contextual elements. An important question is how language- and culture-neutral a narrative can be made. That is why other researchers have given preference to more ‘natural’ settings, like in Maynard’s (1990) contrastive study of back-channel cues. Another successful attempt to ‘control’ naturally occurring data in such a way that contrastive (and maybe even typological) analysis becomes possible, can be found in Dingemanse and Enfield (2015). Chesterman (1998: 37) has a good point when he says, in relation to attempts to do pragmatic contrastive research, that it is becoming more and more evident that equivalence as a whole is a relative concept, so that references to ‘identity’ increasingly give way to the notion of ‘maximum similarity’. This is further strengthened by the observation that certain types of research, such as pragmatics-based ideology research (as argued in Verschueren 1996), are hard to imagine without a contrastive point of view. To get a better idea of the methodological issues involved in contrastive analysis, which hinges on the notion of variability, one might be inclined to seek inspiration in variation analysis. Variation analysis has developed sophisticated procedures to deal even with phenomena that seem to resist operationalization. Underlying this type of variation analysis, however, there is a theoretical assumption of equivalence, which must be recast as a relative notion. Different ways of saying the ‘same’ thing, therefore, are expected in pragmatics to involve forms of variation that go beyond what variation analysis is designed to deal with. Bringing up the issue of explicitness vs. implicitness in this context is not accidental. Contrastive analysis has served, amongst other things, the practical goals of translation and interpreting. It should be clear that contrastive pragmatics thrives on a tension between assumed aspects of universality and observed variability in aspects of language use. Thus it is assumed that there is not only cross-linguistic diversity, but that there are also patterns underlying it. In linguistics, the search for such patterns is usually called typology. However, most forms of contrastive pragmatics do not fit that label because, more often than not, only two or a few languages are compared, which is not enough to establish patterns that would be characteristic for language use in general. Among the works reviewed so far, Dingemanse and Enfield’s (2015) exercise in contrastive conversation analysis comes closest to what a real pragmatic typology could look like, the range of languages they consider being quite wide (from English to Italian and Russian, from Cha’palaa in Ecuador to Siwu in Ghana and Yélî Dnye in Papua New Guinea), even if restricted in number. For pragmatics it may not even be too far-fetched to think that, if computational techniques enable us to detect forms of group adherence (gender, age, and the like) on the basis of aspects of language use, there may be ‘typological’ differences along such dimensions as well. That could also mean that when thinking about pragmatic typology, we may have to think in terms of multiple configurations of usage correlates. Therefore, this occupies the center stage in various approaches in the field.