Leaner, cleaner, and full of attitude

Early fieldwork for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada (later, theLinguistic Atlas Project, or LAP) consisted of 6- to 8-hour-long interviews designedto elicit lexical, phonological, and grammatical targets from native informants inpredominantly English-speaking communities throughout North America. Fieldworkers for the project were trained to ask questions that were usually in the formof descriptive phrases that tasked the speaker to name the item being described(these were often framed by the phrase what would you call [description]) or fill-in-the-blank questions that asked the speaker to supply the target as the missingword (if a glass fell on a hard floor and shattered, you would say the glass ______).For the earliest surveys, responses were written down in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but later interviews were tape recorded in their entirety andthe responses transcribed from the recordings. The ultimate goal of the earliest surveys was the mapping of dialect boundaries, particularly the mapping of individuallinguistic features. Over time, however, the goals and structure of the LAP interview have changed.The overarching goal of LAP interviews has shifted from an interest in isoglossesand dialect boundaries to a desire to record variation and to investigate the correlations between that variation and specific social and regional groups. Today’sLAP interviews take the form of conversational interviews that still seek namesfor specific foods, animals, weather phenomena, etc., as well as morphological andsyntactic forms, but also address the contemporary sociolinguistic interest in perceptions and attitudes. This paper provides details of the new hybrid LAP interview,one whose format offers the best of all worlds: a set of dialectological targets thatwill facilitate comparisons across LAP surveys and through time, the free-flowingconversation prized by traditional sociolinguistics for grammatical andphonological analysis, and questions aimed at getting at interviewees’ attitudes and beliefsabout language use in their communities. Interviews have already been conductedin Kentucky with this new framework.

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