Abstract
N DIALECT GEOGRAPHY of the atlas kind, there are, at the primary level, only two kinds of questions that can be put to informants: direct and indirect. Direct questions specifically name the sound or word or construction being investigated; an outrageous example might be, As a general rule, do you drop your g's or not? An indirect question would not specify the linguistic point of interest, and might even disguise it, asking, for example, What is this? and showing a picture of a frying pan. For most of the twentieth century, it has been felt fairly generally that direct questions are highly suspect.' Even at their best, it is argued, they are LEADING questions; they do not produce objective data. Should they-by chance or desperate necessity-be used after all, the results are not to be compared with other results. Thus there are strongly worded strictures concerning direct questions in the written instructions to fieldworkers from such investigators as Hans Kurath, Raven McDavid, and Murray Kinloch. The Instructions for Field Work reproduced in Kurath (1939, p. 48) include this warning:
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