Understanding Pragmatics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Language Use is an introductory-level textbook focusing on linguistic pragmatics; the transdiscipline that studies language- and culture-specific forms of language use as social action. Languages are used by their speakers in multimodal social interactions according to language- and culture-specific conventions, rules and regulations. This book discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, situative and interpersonal contexts, culture specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. Discussed from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, the chapters of this book debate a selection of core issues within pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, linguistic ideologies, gesture conversation analysis and interaction strategies. The insights into the complex field of the study of language use are illustrated with examples from a broad variety of different languages and culture, making this book ideal for students on English language and linguistics courses.