The chapter addresses a problem of contrastive pragmatics: How can we study correspondences between pragmatic markers in two languages if one language has a class of elements that the other language lacks? Specifically, the contribution deals with modal particles of German (ja and doch) and their reflexes in English translations. As there is no predetermined set of potential English correspondences, traditional distributional analyses are not feasible, and methods from Natural Language Processing are explored instead. Using 32 types of n-grams, differing in length and type of annotation, three classification tasks are carried out, in order to identify cues in the English translations that reflect the presence (or absence) of a particle in the German original. The results show that lemma-unigrams and -bigrams are often most informative (i.e. most accurate), while trigrams and 1-skip-2-grams provide important information about concomitants of modal particles that unigrams and bigrams miss. The results show that linguistic observables (n-grams) as the basis of quantitative analyses need to be carefully selected and explored in terms of their contribution to linguistic analysis.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the chronological background of cross-cultural pragmatics. We argue that cross-cultural pragmatics cannot be traced back to a single academic tradition but rather it is an outcome of the confluence of various strands of academic inquiry, spanning speech act theory, to discourse analysis and to contrastive linguistics. We also discuss the ground-breaking Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP), which represents a cornerstone in the development of cross-cultural pragmatics. We devote particular attention to the research methodologies that the CCSARP Project deployed. We argue that while the methodological framework of the CCSARP Project has been subject to major criticisms, it laid down the foundations of what we define as dualcontrastive and ancillary research in our cross-cultural pragmatic framework. In Chapter 2, we also discuss the current state of the field and the reason why this book is needed to fill a knowledge gap.