In linguistics (as in sociology, social psychology, and other social sciences) elicitation is the general term for describing various methods of directed data collection and thus for corpus construction. Elicited data certainly help to answer a number of specific questions; however, elicitation sessions are speech events that as such influence the kind of language used. If linguists with special interests in pragmatics want to explore the realization of speech act patterns such as requests and apologies crossculturally, and if they also want to investigate similarities and differences between native and non-native speakers’ realization patterns in these speech acts, they can devise controlled elicitation procedures like discourse completion tests.