Thirty years of discourse completion test in contrastive pragmatics research

Abstract

Discourse Completion Test (DCT) became a very popular research instrument after the publication of the infl uential Blum-Kulka & Olshtain’s (1984) paper titled “Requests and apologies: a cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP)”. Hundreds and thousands of papers employing the data collection instrument, originally developed by Blum-Kulka in 1982, have been published since then, and the controlled elicitation procedure has left a very important mark on the way in which speech acts have been studied cross-culturally. DCT has its strong supporters as well as pronounced enemies, but its contribution to the development of the fi eld cannot be questioned. The paper presents an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of the data collection tool, as well as a synthesis of the most important fi ndings which it has managed to yield so far. Major directions of research are summarized and possible future developments outlined.