Research Paper

Methodology

"if culture is knowledge it can exist only inside people's heads, so there is a problem in studying it: how can one know what the cultural knowledge of Mr.x is? does one need to examine the cultural knowledge of every member of the community?
( Hudson, 1980:74)

In this statement, Hudson provides one of the important problems raised by methodology in linguistic research. Students in this field are usually confronted with such problems together with many other hindrances of different types. Some of these hindrances concern the choice of the appropriate and effective methods to adopt when collecting data; other problems relate to the measures whereby one has to select his/her informants.

Besides the problems mentioned above, I have encountered many other ones while I was collecting my data. In fact, all these problems stem, it seems, from the fact that people in our society are not familiar with the practice of answering questions relating to sociological or socio-linguistic studies about themselves. Most of the people, for instance, when asked about what they would say in such or such situation, do not give the right answer which they might otherwise provide in real life situations. In addition, I have noticed that tape recorders are likely to make people in our society feel uncomfortable as most of the people among whom friends and members of my family- refuse to record interactions among their families especially those involving women. Tape recording , then, is considered in our community to be culturally inappropriate.

To overcome these difficulties raised by methodology, I have tried my best to make my method of data collection adequate and inclusive so as to realize generalization and to result in naturalistic data.

The corpus of compliments upon which my analysis rests in this study consists of 130 compliments. All of which are gathered through direct observation on the day of "l'Aid Sghir". The compliments are collected with the assistance of sixteen of my friends including eight females and eight males. Their age range from 22 years to 26. All of them are students who are studying English at Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakech. Among these students there are ten who are studying linguistics. Because it is important in analysis of this sort to have data from different range of speakers and speech situations, I have tried to ensure, while I was selecting those students, that they represent different quarters of Marrakech.

The students are instructed to write down the exact words used in the compliment exchanges and to do so as soon as possible after the interaction has taken place. In addition, they are asked to record as much contextual detail as is available to them. Such details include age, sex, topic of compliment, and the relationship between speaker and addressee. Factors such as these are potentially important to the understanding of the structure and function of compliments. Finally, it is important to note that all the compliments included in this study are given and received by women and men (also children) of different ages, sexes, social groups, and occupations. It also includes compliments, which are produced by and addressed to educated as well as illiterate people. The relationships of the interlocutors are equally varied, so that we have exchanges between family members, intimate friends and colleagues, neighbors and mere acquaintances.

A research paper submitted to the department of English of Cadi Ayyad University
in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Licence-es-Letters in English
Year : 1998 - 1999 / Major : Linguistics / Seminar Title :Pragmatics
Supervisor : Dr. GAJJOUT Hassan