Leaner, cleaner, and full of attitude

Early fieldwork for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada (later, the
Linguistic Atlas Project, or LAP) consisted of 6- to 8-hour-long interviews designed
to elicit lexical, phonological, and grammatical targets from native informants in
predominantly English-speaking communities throughout North America.
Fieldworkers for the project were trained to ask questions that were usually in the form
of 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 missing
word (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 and
the responses transcribed from the recordings. The ultimate goal of the earliest
surveys was the mapping of dialect boundaries, particularly the mapping of individual
linguistic 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 isoglosses
and dialect boundaries to a desire to record variation and to investigate the
correlations between that variation and specific social and regional groups. Today’s
LAP interviews take the form of conversational interviews that still seek names
for specific foods, animals, weather phenomena, etc., as well as morphological and
syntactic 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 that
will facilitate comparisons across LAP surveys and through time, the free-flowing
conversation prized by traditional sociolinguistics for grammatical and
phonological analysis, and questions aimed at getting at interviewees’ attitudes and beliefs
about language use in their communities. Interviews have already been conducted
in Kentucky with this new framework.