Kerry Mullan is Associate Professor and Convenor of Languages in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. She teaches French language and culture, and sociolinguistics. Her main research interests are cross-cultural communication and the differing interactional styles of French and Australian English speakers. She also researches in the areas of intercultural pragmatics, discourse analysis, language teaching and in humour in social interactions. Her publications include Expressing opinions in French and Australian English discourse: A semantic and interactional analysis (2010) and Cross-culturally speaking, speaking cross-culturally (ed. with B. Peeters and C. Béal, 2013).

This book is the second in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. It focuses on meaning and culture, with sections on "Words as Carriers of Cultural Meaning" and "Understanding Discourse in Cultural Context". 

Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.