This volume explores intercultural communication in specialist fields and its realisations in language for specific purposes. Special attention is given to legal, commercial, political and institutional discourse used in particular workplaces, analysed from an intercultural perspective. The contributions explore to what extent intercultural pressure leads to particular discourse patternings and lexico-grammatical / phonological realisations, and also the extent to which textual re-encoding and recontextualisation alter the pragmatic value of the texts taken into consideration.

The Editors: Christopher N. Candlin is Senior Research Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney. He holds Honorary Professorships at the Universities of Lancaster, Nottingham and Cardiff (UK), and is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the UK Open University and Leverhulme Visiting Professor in Health Communication Research at Cardiff. He is a member of the Editorial Board of several international journals, and edits or co-edits seven international book series. From 1996 to 2002 he was President of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA).
Maurizio Gotti is Professor of English and Director of the Language Centre at the University of Bergamo. He is currently President of CERCLES (the European Confederation of University Language Centres) and Director of CERLIS, the research centre on specialized languages based at the University of Bergamo. From 1999 to 2001 he was President of AIA (Italian Association of English Studies).