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T HIS PAPER originates with fieldwork on the dialect of New Brunswick, Canada, during 1969-70.1 The worksheet used was that of the Maritimes Dialect Survey, itself development from the short worksheet used the fieldwork for the Linguistic Atlas of New England.2 The object of the paper is twofold: I intend to report on the origin and construction of pictorial aid to elicitation and thereafter to report also on the attempt to measure its value as tool for investigating dialect. Investigating dialect is often matter of persuading an informant to pronounce certain specific words, and, as any fieldworker knows, this is often surprisingly difficult to do, especially since fieldwork technique forbids the fieldworker to pronounce the desired word himself. It is not that informants are perverse or stupid; indeed, they are almost always cooperative and intelligent. But the difficulty of zeroing in on one specific word from the informant's entire vocabulary is often little short of immense. To take one example, trying to elicit tomato without saying the actual word, I found myself talking of a round, bright red, eatable thing, about the size of an apple; it grows the garden on plant you stake up, it's about 3 feet high, and you eat it with lettuce salad. Quite apart from the fact that this question is imprecise and time-consuming, as often as not the informant's response was orange, radish, carrot, Macintosh Red, or the like, all of them interesting and some important, but none the word I wanted at that time. The dictionary did not help (What do you call the glossy, fleshy fruit of
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