The contrastive empirical study of pragmatic markers from a cross-linguistic perspective has been given a fair amount of attention by a numerous number of publications (for example Cuenca 2008) recently. In line with this interest, Pragmatic Markers and Pragmaticalization: Lessons from false friends contributes, first and foremost, to a systematic investigation into the study of pragmatic markers through compiling five papers along with three book reviews in one volume. The book explores semantics and pragmatic functions of discourse markers from varied Romance and Germanic languages. The volume has three editors. Peter Lauwers and Gudrun Vanderbauwhede, from the universities of Ghent and Leuven, have many publications with respect to cross-linguistic contrastive research (for example Lauwers and Vermote 2014; Vanderbauwhede 2012). Also, Stijn Verleyen, from Research Foundation – Flanders, has a number of publications among which is The French and Dutch noun phrase in contrast (Vanderbauwhede and Verleyen 2010), a contrastive study of demonstratives and definite articles in French and Dutch published jointly with Vanderbauwhede. In the introduction section, the editors provide an insightful description of the topic and a delimitation of the material investigated in the different chapters. The results of the papers are also well positioned in literature as they contribute to the existing theoretical discussions on pragmatic markers, that is, the bottom-up identification of cross-linguistic pragmatic functions, the applicability of establishing a semantic map to the study of pragmatic markers, the discrimination of typological differences between languages and language families, and finally the matter of grammaticalization versus pragmaticalization. Nevertheless, one criticism that can be made both about the title of the book and the title of the introduction – How false friends give true hints about pragmatic markers – is that they are not generalizable to all articles presented in the book. As a matter of fact, merely three articles (out of five) study discourse markers which fall into the category of false friends. Hence, the focus could have been shifted towards “cognate forms,” as a basic feature common to all items under investigation throughout the book. In addition, the editors could have clarified the typological difference that exists between the false friends under investigation. In fact, the particles investigated in Beeching’s and Carretero’s papers are attributable to the category of partial (semantic) false friends, that is “those words that have several senses, some of which coincide in both languages while others do not” (Chamizo Domínguez and Nerlich 2002: 1836). Besides, the studied particles in the paper by Defour et al. would exemplify the definition of full (semantic) false friends, “those words whose meanings in various languages diverge widely […]” (Chamizo Domínguez and Nerlich 2002: 1836). Among the merits of the volume is its unity, specifically the internal consistency of the articles in terms of topic, methodology and results. Indeed, all articles investigate pragmatic functions of the forms that are either etymological or semantic cognates. Furthermore, on the basis of well-established methodologies, all articles contrast the empirical data from a cross-linguistic viewpoint and their results make important contributions to the study of pragmatic markers. The uniformity of content coupled with the instructive introduction of the editors gives the readership valuable insight into cognate discourse markers. As to the corpora analyzed in the articles, it is worth noting that although the variety of translations of a given discourse marker in different contexts makes it difficult to specify cross-linguistic semantic similarities, the use of translation parallel corpus by Beeching and Defour et al. is defensible. As Aijmer, Foolen et al. (2006: 111) put it, translation corpora are heuristic “in the study of pragmatic markers precisely because of their underspecified core meaning …