Amazon.com description: Product Description: Why do people from different cultural backgrounds often misunderstand each other even when they use a common language to interact? Why do arguments that we find reasonable not seem so to members of other cultural groups? Global Linguistics: An Introduction addresses these and other basic questions about language and discourse in intercultural communication, providing a solid and accessible introduction to ""global linguistics"": an interdisciplinary field combining insights from contact linguistics, pragmatics, conceptual metaphor theory and argumentation theory.