My research focuses on pragmatics, in particular the areas of pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics. I have special interest in the study of Chinese and English language use and their contrastive study. My research areas include linguistic politeness research, interaction ritual, language aggression, intercultural pragmatics, and the strictly language-anchored study of foreign language learning. I am Ordinary Member of Academia Europaea and one of the Editors of the Brill Journal Contrastive Pragmatics (www.brill.com/jocp).