Istvan Kecskes is Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York, Albany. He is the President of the American Pragmatics Association and the CASLAR (Chinese as a Second Language Research) Association. He is author of Foreign Language and Mother Tongue (2000, with Tunde Papp), Situation-Bound Utterances in L1 and L2 (2003) and Intercultural Pragmatics (2013). He is the founding editor of the journal Intercultural Pragmatics