Discourse Completion Task
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.
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Sources
- Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (Eds.) (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Ablex Publishing. ISBN: 9780893915131
- Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13(2), 215–247. DOI: 10.1017/S0272263100009955 ↗
- Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. (2010). Data collection methods in speech act performance: DCTs, role plays, and verbal reports. In A. Martínez-Flor & E. Usó-Juan (Eds.), Speech Act Performance: Theoretical, Empirical and Methodological Issues (pp. 41–56). John Benjamins. ISBN: 9789027219930
How to cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Discourse Completion Task for Eliciting Pragmatic Data. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/en/linguistics/discourse-completion-task
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