Compare methods

	Discourse Completion Task	Matched-Guise Technique	Variationist Sociolinguistics
Field	Linguistics	Linguistics	Linguistics
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1989	1960	1972
Originator	Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House & Gabriele Kasper (CCSARP project)	Wallace Lambert and colleagues	William Labov
Type	Written/oral elicitation instrument for speech-act data	Indirect experimental measure of language attitudes	Quantitative field study of socially conditioned linguistic variation
Seminal source	Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (Eds.) (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Ablex Publishing. ISBN: 9780893915131	Lambert, W. E., Hodgson, R. C., Gardner, R. C., & Fillenbaum, S. (1960). Evaluational reactions to spoken languages. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60(1), 44–51.	Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN: 9780812210521
Aliases	Discourse Completion Test, DCT, Production Questionnaire	Matched Guise Test, Matched-Guise Experiment, Language Attitude Matched Guise	Variationist Analysis, Labovian Sociolinguistics, Quantitative Sociolinguistics
Related	3	2	4
Summary	The discourse completion task (DCT) is an elicitation instrument widely used in pragmatics to gather data on how people perform speech acts such as requests, apologies, refusals, and compliments. Respondents read short descriptions of situations and write (or say) what they would utter in each, allowing researchers to collect comparable speech-act data across many speakers, languages, and cultures under controlled conditions. It was popularized by the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) of Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper in 1989.	The matched-guise technique is an indirect experimental method for measuring attitudes toward languages, dialects, and accents. Developed by Wallace Lambert and colleagues in 1960, it has the same bilingual or bidialectal speaker record the same passage in two or more language varieties ('guises'); listeners, believing they are hearing different speakers, rate each recording on personality and status traits. Because the voice, content, and delivery are held constant, any differences in the ratings can be attributed to listeners' attitudes toward the variety itself.	Variationist sociolinguistics is the quantitative study of how linguistic variation is structured by social and linguistic factors. Pioneered by William Labov in the 1960s and 1970s, it treats alternative ways of saying the same thing — the 'linguistic variable' — as systematically conditioned by speaker characteristics (class, age, sex, ethnicity), stylistic context, and the surrounding linguistic environment, and it uses statistical modeling of natural speech to reveal the orderly heterogeneity beneath apparent randomness.