Frontmatter -- Dedicated to the memory of Peter Tiersma -- Preface -- Contents -- List of contributors -- 1. Introduction -- I. Linguistic-pragmatic approaches to inference in law -- 2. Telling it slant: Toward a taxonomy of deception -- 3. Cooperation in Chinese courtroom discourse -- 4. Inference and intention in legal interpretation -- 5. Pragmatics and legal texts: How best to account for the gaps between literal meaning and communicative meaning -- 6. One ambiguity, three legal approaches -- II. Horizons of inference: Extending the context of interpretation -- 7. Between similarity and analogy: Rethinking the role of prototypes in law and cognitive linguistics -- 8. When is an insult a crime? On diverging conceptualizations and changing legislation -- 9. Pragmatic interpretation by judges: Constrained performatives and the deployment of gender bias -- 10. Disguising the dynamism of the law in Canadian courts: Judges using dictionaries -- III. Across borders: New methods for study of inference -- 11. Legal translation pragmatics: Legal meaning as text-external convention - the case of 'chattels' -- 12. Calculating legal meanings? Drawbacks and opportunities of corpus-assisted legal linguistics to make the law (more) explicit -- 13. The common error in theories of adjudication: An inferentialist argument for a doctrinal conception -- 14. On inferencing in law -- Subject index