Pola Sapaan Pelajar Lelaki Dan Perempuan Di Sebuah Institusi Pengajian Tinggi: Satu Kajian Sosiopragmatik.

The objective of this paper is to present greeting patterns among undergraduate students at a public higher learning institution in Malaysia. The study emerged from the researchers' random observations on inappropriateness of greetings behavior among the students which brought about the questions of the extent of their sociopragmatic competence. It specifically looks at the greeting patterns based on contexts, formality level and the relationships between the interlocutors. The paper will focus on presenting findings based on sex differences, and relating the gender factor to cultural and sociopragmatic aspects, based on Leech's (1993) sociopragmatics principles and Sherzer's (1987) features of male-female differences in interactions. Data from this study was collected via Discourse Completion Tasks, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic observations. The DCT consists of 15 elicited settings, distributed to 264 respondents, giving a total of 3960 greeting outcomes. 30 respondents from the group of 264 contributed to the interview data. The ethnographic observations took 3 months of field work. Overall, the findings showed that interlocutors with close social distance preferred nonconventional greetings. Female students with close social relations would greet with the hearer with his/her first name, while male students would nod or said "hi". The presentations of the findings and discussions end with providing implications and suggestions for future research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]