Acknowledgements

We wish to express our sincere gratitude to Miriam A. Locher and Anita Fetzer, the editors of the Pragmatics and Beyond series for their support of this book project, and to Isja Conen from John Benjamins for her encouragement throughout the project.

The volume is a product of the 17th International Pragmatics Conference held in Winthertur, Switzerland in 2021. We wish to thank all the contributors to the Winthertur panel and to the present volume, as well as those who shared their linguacultural insights and analysis, for their collegiality during this joint project. Special thanks also go to the two anonymous reviewers. Their comments and suggestions helped us not only fine tune each chapter but also discover the most effective and relevant framing of the volume. We also thank Janet Davey for her editorial assistance at the final stage of the project.

Last but not least, we wish to express our particular gratitude to Anna Wierzbicka for pioneering cross-cultural pragmatics more than three decades ago. The cultural pragmatics that we propose in this book is a continuation of her ideas and approach. We recognize that the current pragmatic landscape is far more diverse than it was in the heydays of universalist pragmatics. The ability to freely explore topics in cultural pragmatics, such as those addressed in this book on “danger”, is a direct result of her groundbreaking work and contribution to pragmatics.