Penyelidikan Lakuan Bahasa: Pemilihan Kaedah dan Pola Penemuan

This paper compares the methods commonly used in speech acts research, among which are discourse completion tasks, role playing, and participation and nonparticipation observation. Several examples based on these methods are presented, along with findings, strengths and constraints. More specifically this article focuses on complaints within a Malay language community and highlights how the choice of methods influences data type and potential findings. The study shows that using participant and non-participant observation reveal more than the usual linguistic features of complaint such as the components that made up the set of complaint and the severity of complaint. The data from this study give the sociolinguistic pattern of complaint, namely codeswitching and social strategies of the speech act. Some examples of types of codeswitching and social strategies are included in the discussion. To conclude, the discussion in this article contributes to the sociolinguistics field, specifically the understanding of Malay sociolinguistics.