Contributions of the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil Pr azil Project to the Methodology of Geolinguistic Resear to the Methodology of Geolinguistic Researto the Methodology of Geolinguistic Research: the role of the inquirer

Abstract

The methodological procedures used in the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil Project (ALiB) depart from the procedures traditionally used in the collection of dialect data by expanding the types of questionnaires - phonetic-phonological, semantic-lexical and morphosyntactic - and by including questions relating to prosody, pragmatics and metalinguistic aspects, as well as themes for eliciting semi-directed speech, and a text for reading. Thus, the Project aims at providing a larger set of data, contemplating less studied aspects of the Brazilian linguistic reality, such as variation in prosody, pragmatics, register and linguistic attitude. In this sense, this project presents aspects related to the methodological procedures in the ALiB Project surveys. In the present article, the interviewer’s role during the interviews, which are seen as unique experiences that far exceed the simple completion of the survey, will be highlighted, setting out the strategies used to achieve the desired data and to solve difficulties faced by interviewers in order to obtain certain responses.

Keywords

• Methodology
• Interviews
• Linguistic Atlas of Brazil Project