Strategies to Obtain Answers on ALiB Interviews about Question 054 - Aftosa (Foot-and-Mouth Disease) in the Capital Cities of Midwest and Southeast of Brazil

Abstract

Based on the theoretical-methodological precepts of Dialectology and Sociolinguistic, this article aims at describing the strategies used by the inquirers of the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil Project (ALiB) in the reformulation of question 054 from the phonetic-phonological questionnaire (QFF) to obtain the answer aftosa (foot-and-mouth disease) in interviews carried out in the Midwest and Southeast capitals. Therefore, we recollect the historic route of Geolinguistics and of the Project ALiB, we reflect on the steps of the geolinguistic research, focusing on the inquirer’s conduct , we comment on the relevance of world knowledge and shared knowledge of informant and inquirer for the success of studies of this nature, and finally, we analyze the strategies of the inquirer to obtain the corresponding answer to the question aforementioned, making brief comments about the socio-economic formation of the regions in question. The corpus of this study consists of interviews from the surveys of the Project ALiB, which reveal that aftosa, because it is a variant connected to the country life, was mentioned mostly by speakers of the Midwest, whereas in the Southeast, there are more reformulations of the questions, probably because this word is not part of these informants’ daily life.