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At the time of writing, on 15 March 2012, the query “cognitive pragmatics”(inserted between inverted commas in a Google search) harvested a mere 714 real (37,400 estimated) websites from the Internet. The majority of these pages related to one of three sources: a book by Bruno Bara (2010) entitled Cognitive Pragmatics, a research initiative referred to by that name by Asa Kasher or, indeed, to advance announcements of this handbook and individual contributions to it. At present, then, there is little evidence that the term Cognitive Pragmatics is well established, and this provokes the following questions: What is Cognitive Pragmatics? What is the niche it is supposed to fill in the already highly diversified landscape of approaches to the study of language? And why (on earth, the reader may well be inclined to add) should a voluminous handbook be devoted to this so far apparently rather marginal field of inquiry? Cognitive Pragmatics can initially be defined as dealing with the reciprocal relationship between pragmatics and cognition. Considering that pragmatics is concerned with “meaning-in-context”(Bublitz and Norrick 2011: 4), it follows that Cognitive Pragmatics focuses on the cognitive aspects of the construal of meaning-in-context. This pertains to both language production and comprehension, and it specifically concerns one of the key questions that pragmatics has set out to answer: What are the cognitive abilities and processes required to be able to arrive at “what can or must be said” in order to get across “what is meant” and to arrive at “what is meant” on the basis of “what is said”? This conception of Cognitive Pragmatics is, to a large …