Preface to the Special Issue of Lingue e Linguaggi "Pragmatic efficiency and text comprehension in L1 and L2 spoken and written communication"

This special issue tries to offer a multifaceted picture of the role of pragmatic processing in written and spoken communication in a first and foreign language. The fourteen articles collected in the volume present the outcomes of a two-year project funded by the University of Pisa which brought together researchers working in the fields of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese linguistics and language teaching and sharing a common interest in the complex interaction of the features of different language systems, linguistic tasks and language users when pragmatic processing is required.