The Inquirer and the Difficulties in Obtaining Answers to the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil (Atlas Linguístico do Brasil): the case of doido

Abstract

This study relates to the methodology of the Linguistic Atlas of Brazil (Atlas Linguístico do Brasil) (ALiB), which is an interinstitutional research project aiming at describing the Brazilian linguistic reality by means of dialectal records gathered in 250 localities distributed around all the Regions of the country. Due to the increasing expansion of researches of lexical, phonetic-phonological, morphologic and pragmatic nature and many others based on the Project ALiB’s database, this article aims at analyzing the methodology of this project. It also proposes: (i) to analyze the answers given by the informants from the capitals of the North and South Regions to the Question 138 of the ALiB’s Phonetic-Phonological Questionnaire (QFF) (COMITÊ NACIONAL DO PROJETO ALiB, 2001); (ii) to discuss the difficulties encountered by the inquirers in obtaining the answers; and (iii) to verify the strategies utilized by the interviewer to obtain the desired item. For that purpose, the studies by Pop (1950), Buesa Oliver and Flórez (1954), Aguilera (1992, 1998, 2000), Brandão and Moraes (1998), Pontes and Aguilera (1999), Aguilera, Amâncio and Paes (2003) and Aguilera and Yida (2008) served as a basis. The study indicated that, in both Brazilian Regions and particularly in the South Region, the informants had some difficulty in immediately registering, as a first answer, the form doido (madman). It also demonstrated that there is not a way to predict the possibility of the informant, despite knowing the word in question, to use it in a different context other than to say that a person is furious or aggressive. We cannot discard, however, the interviewer’s difficulty in reformulating the question in order to make it clearer to the informant, given that each informant has his/her own personal history.