With this collection of papers, we honour the work by a remarkable scholar: Shoshana Blum-Kulka who died ten years ago. Shoshana was a prolific researcher who made pioneer contributions to many different fields, including translation studies, discourse analysis, cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics, family, political and media discourse, as well as pragmatic development in L1 and L2. Shoshana’s contributions to translation studies, written in the 1980, are still quoted widely, especially her classic article on translation shifts that appeared in 1986 in our co-edited volume Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition. Shoshana’s research on lexical simplification in Second Language Acquisition proved to be another classic and widely cited work. Shoshana also turned her attention to speech act theory, politeness and cross-cultural pragmatics. Together with a number of colleagues from many different countries she set up a project that would become one of the most influential works in cross-cultural pragmatics: the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP), featuring a new method of eliciting, analysing and comparing speech acts (requests and apologies) in seven different languages and language varieties. CCSARP inspired generations of young scholars to conduct follow-up studies, applying the methodology developed in the CCSARP team to many different language pairs. Two members of the original CCSARP team are contributors to this collection of papers in Contrastive Pragmatics: Elite Olshtain and Elda Weizman. Others, like Zohar Kampf, are disciples of Shoshana’s. The 1989 CCSARP volume, the 1996 volume on Interlanguage Pragmatics, as well as many articles in reputable journals are evidence of Shoshana’s seminal contributions to pragmatics.

With her work on the metapragmatics of politeness in Israeli society, which appeared in 1992 in the volume Politeness in Language, another highly influential book, Shoshana now turned to authentic discourse and a more qualitative, ethnographic methodology in discourse pragmatics. She looked at misunderstandings, analysing the linguaculturally distinct ways in which native Israeli, native Americans and American immigrants in Israel communicated with one another in the context of a particular event: the family dinner. She chose this event because she recognised it as a prime site of children’s pragmatic development in processes of socialisation and sociability, and as an occasion for conversational story-telling as a means of meaning-making. Her 1997 book Dinner Talk: Cultural Patterns of Sociability and Socialization in Family Discourse is full of insights into the functioning of such a complex multi-party intergenerational event. She demonstrated the relevance of ‘dinner talk’ for children’s induction into the communicative conventions and styles of a particular linguaculture. This study, which naturally benefited from her earlier theoretical work on politeness and indirectness, was later extended to include different genres and led to a fruitful cooperation in bi-national projects with Catherine Snow. Shoshana continued her work on pragmatic development looking at young children’s interaction and its function as a tool for discursive learning and meaning making in a particular peer culture. Her interest in talk among preschool children and its role in pragmatic development led her to also consider a wide variety of genres: casual talk, narratives, arguments, pretend play and explanations.

Another facet of Shoshana’s rich oeuvre is her work on mediated political discourse, including her seminal work in the 80s on political interviews, and her later work on debates and talk shows.

Shoshana Blum-Kulka’s contributions to so many different fields show the enormous breadth of her interests over a lifetime of research and social engagement. Her work and our admiration for her achievements will stay with us. She will not be forgotten, and the papers in this issue of Contrastive Pragmatics testify to this.

Juliane House

Co-Editor of Contrastive Pragmatics

Hamburg, 27 September, 2023