The Questionnaire on Speech Actions in English: Development of an ethnographically grounded empirical data elicitation method in Variational Pragmatics

The Questionnaire on Speech Actions in English has been developed as part of the research project A Pragmatic Profile of Namibian English: Exploring norms of communicative behaviour in a multilingual ecology, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). A central goal in this process was to create a research instrument specifically suited for researching pragmatics in the Namibian context, taking an emic perspective on the phenomena we intended to explore to ensure a high level of ecological validity. In the present report, we make this research instrument available to fellow researchers in a well-documented fashion, including a description of the development process itself, notes on methodological decisions, a brief report on how the instrument was applied for data gathering in Namibia and the UK, and general advice on how to revise and apply it for purposes other than the investigation of Namibian English pragmatics. The appendices include the original DCT questionnaire as employed in Namibia, an online version used in the UK, as well as interview guidelines for the qualitative line of research that informed and complemented our quantitative research in empirical pragmatics.