Eliciting data with modal questionnaires with oral contexts

This paper’s goal is to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of presenting written vs. oral contexts in questionnaires for fieldwork with underdescribed languages. This research is based on methods employed in fieldwork for semantic analysis (Matthewson, 2004; 2011; Sanchez-Mendes, 2014; Bochnak; Matthewson, 2015; Vander Klok; Rech; Guesser, 2023). Questionnaires are defined as a set of questions designed to elicit a constrained set of answers from multiple respondents (Vander Klok; Connors, 2019) which are normally presented in a written format. We argue that certain linguistic conditions require the application of oral questionnaires, basing this claim on our fieldwork experience with the Guinean language. Despite Guinean having literate speakers and a writing system that should allow the application of questionnaires in a written format, its speakers study Portuguese at schools, not their mother language. Therefore, they are familiarized with writing and reading in Portuguese, not Guinean. Moreover, the writing system proposed for Guinean (Scantamburlo, 1999; 2019) is not adopted broadly in the country. In this scenario, the presentation of contexts orally guarantees that illiterate speakers or speakers of languages with no writing system can do the task. Moreover, using audio resources from native speakers guarantees that the consultant has access to subtle prosodic features that might affect meaning which could be lost in written form (Ferreira, 2024). Another advantage is that it makes the questionnaire more dynamic and less demanding. The disadvantages are the necessity of having previous access to native speakers to record the audios, a development process of questionnaires which is longer, more complex and less flexible for adaptations.