W. Nelson Francis (October 23, 1910 – June 14, 2002) was an American author, linguist, and university professor. He served as a member of the faculties of
Franklin & Marshall College
Franklin & Marshall College (F&M) is a private liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It employs 175 full-time faculty members and has a student body of approximately 2,400 full-time students. It was founded upon the merger of Fran ...
and
Brown University
Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...
, where he specialized in English and
corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is the study of language, study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus (plural ''corpora''), its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feas ...
. He is known for his work compiling a
text collection entitled the ''
Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English'', which he completed with
Henry Kučera.
Early life
Winthrop Nelson Francis was born on October 23, 1910 in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...
. Both of his parents were from
New England
New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York to the west and by the Canadian provinces ...
. His mother was raised in
Calais, Maine. His mother attended
Wellesley College
Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficial g ...
and taught public school in
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
, before marrying Francis' father and moving to Philadelphia. His father, Joseph Sidney Francis,
was a mathematician and engineer. Francis grew up in the
Germantown area of Philadelphia, where he attended the Charles W. Henry Public School and Penn Charter School.
[Koerner, E.F.K. (1998). ''First Person Singular III: Autobiographies by North American Scholars in the Language Sciences'', "A Pilgrim's Progress: From Philology to Linguistics", John Benjamins Publishing, pages 61–69. ]
He earned an undergraduate degree in 1931 from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
, where he majored in Literature, focusing on the study of English, Greek, Latin, and French.
He later attended the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...
, where he earned his
Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...
in English in 1937. His doctoral thesis presented a 14th-century
Middle English
Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English p ...
text, edited by him with an extensive introduction about the textual editing. In 1939, professor and Middle English scholar Carleton Brown read his dissertation and took it to England and presented it to Mabel Day of the
Early English Text Society
The Early English Text Society (EETS) is a text publication society founded in 1864 which is dedicated to the editing and publication of early English texts, especially those only available in manuscript. Most of its volumes contain editions of ...
. In 1942, the manuscript was published by the
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
.
[
]
Professional background
Academics
Following his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, Francis joined the faculty of Franklin & Marshall College
Franklin & Marshall College (F&M) is a private liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It employs 175 full-time faculty members and has a student body of approximately 2,400 full-time students. It was founded upon the merger of Fran ...
, where he taught English. In 1957, he headed a faculty committee, which re-evaluated the college's curriculum. The following year, he was named chair of the English department. His first book, ''The Structure of American English'', was published in 1958.[ His scholarly work on varieties of English additionally included compiling, writing, and editing an edition of the 14th-century ''Book of Vices and Virtues'' for the Early English Text Society. He was honored with a ]Fulbright Research Fellowship
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...
and conducted field research in Norfolk
Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the No ...
, England, between 1956 and 1957 for the '' Survey of English Dialects'', which was being compiled at the University of Leeds
, mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased
, established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds
, ...
.[
In 1962, he joined the faculty of ]Brown University
Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...
as a professor of Linguistics and English.[ In 1964, he began working on a joint language project of Brown University and Tougaloo College, which lasted through 1968. The project applied linguistic principles in a syllabus of Standard American English for African-American freshmen at Tougaloo College.][ After the project was completed, he became the chair of the linguistics department, serving in that capacity through 1976.][ While he officially retired at that time with the title of Emeritus Professor, he continued to teach historical and comparative linguistics and advise students. In 1987, he was appointed chair of Brown's newly established Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. He taught his last course at Brown in 1990.
]
Writing
;''Brown Corpus''
After joining the faculty of Brown, Francis took a course in computational linguistics from Henry Kučera, who taught as a member of the Slavic Department staff. In the early 1960s, they began collaborating on compiling a one-million-word computerized cross-section of American English, which was entitled the ''Brown Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English'', but commonly known as the Brown Corpus. The work was compiled between 1963 and 1964, using books, magazines, newspapers, and other edited sources of informative and imaginative prose published in 1961. Once completed, the ''Brown Corpus'' was published in 1964. Each word in the corpus is tagged with its part of speech and the subject matter category of its source. Disseminated throughout the world, the ''Brown Corpus'' has served as a model for similar projects in other languages and as the basis for numerous scholarly studies, including Francis and Kučera's ''Frequency Analysis of English Usage'', which was published in 1967.
;Magazine and journal contributions
Francis wrote articles that were published in ''American Speech'', ''College Composition and Communication'', ''College English'', ''Computers and the Humanities'', ''Contemporary Psychology'', ''East Anglian Magazine'', ''English Journal'', ''The Explicator'', ''Language'', ''Language in Society'', ''Lingua'', ''Modern Language Notes'', ''PMLA'', ''The Quarterly Journal of Speech'', ''Speculum'', ''Style'', and ''Word''.
Business
In 1977, Francis cofounded the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME The International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) is an international group of linguists and data scientists working in corpus linguistics to digitise English texts. The organisation was founded in Oslo, Norway in 1977 as the ...
) at the University of Oslo
The University of Oslo ( no, Universitetet i Oslo; la, Universitas Osloensis) is a public research university located in Oslo, Norway. It is the highest ranked and oldest university in Norway. It is consistently ranked among the top universit ...
. The organization became the distributor of the ''Brown Corpus''. Corporate publications entitled ''ICAME News'' and ''ICAME Journal'' have been dedicated to him twice. In 1986, the newsletter recognized his work on an individual basis, while ten years later, the journal published "A Tribute to W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kučera".
Speaking
Francis served as a keynote speaker, lecturer, and visiting professor in London; Edinburgh
Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...
; Cairo
Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...
; Tokyo; and Trondheim
Trondheim ( , , ; sma, Tråante), historically Kaupangen, Nidaros and Trondhjem (), is a city and municipality in Trøndelag county, Norway. As of 2020, it had a population of 205,332, was the third most populous municipality in Norway, and ...
, Norway. He also participated in a Nobel Symposium on computer corpus linguistics in Stockholm
Stockholm () is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, largest city of Sweden as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people liv ...
.[
]
Board memberships
* Save the Bay
Save The Bay is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving San Francisco Bay and its related estuarine habitat areas. Founded by Catherine Kerr, Sylvia McLaughlin, and Esther Gulick in 1961, the organization grew into a body that not onl ...
– Member
* National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. ...
(NAACP) – Member
* Urban League of Rhode Island – Member
* Providence Shakespearean Society – President from 1986 to 1990
Published works
Books
* Editor, ''The Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth Century Translation of the 'Somme le Roi' of Lorens d'Orléans'' (Early English Text Society #217)(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1942)
* ''The Structure of American English'' (with a chapter on American English dialects by Raven I. McDavid, Jr)(New York: Ronald Press, 1958)
* ''The History of English'' (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963)
* ''The English Language: An Introduction'' (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963, 1965) LCCN 63-15500 (no ISBN)
* ''Compositional Analysis of Present-Day American English'' (with Henry Kučera)(Providence: Brown University Press, 1967)
* ''Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar'' (with Henry Kučera)(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982)
* ''Dialectology: An Introduction'' (London & New York: Longman, 1983)
Other
* ''A Standard Corpus of Present-Day Edited American English, for Use with Digital Computers'' (with Henry Kučera; computer database) (Providence: Brown University Department of Linguistics, 1964; tagged version, 1969)
* "Modal DAREN'T and DURSTN'T in Dialectal English," in ''Studies in Honour of Harold Orton,'' ed. by Stanley Ellis (Leeds, UK: Leeds University Press, 1970)
* "The English Language and Its History," in ''Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary'', 8th edn. (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam, 1973)
* "Problems of Assembling and Computerizing Large Corpora," in ''Empirische Textwissenschaft: Aufbau und Auswertung von Text-Corpora'', ed. by Henning *Bergenholtz & Burkhard Schaeder (Königsberg: Scriptor, 1979)
* "Dinner speech given at the 5th ICAME Conference at Windermere, England, 21 May 1984", in ''ICAME News'' No. 10 (May 1986)
* "Otto Jesperson as Grammarian," in ''Otto Jesperson: Facets of His Life and Work,'' ed. by Arne Juul & Hans F. Nielsen (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1989)
* "Dialectology," in ''Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics,'' ed. by William Bright. (London: Oxford University Press, 1991)
* "Language Corpora B.C.," in ''Directions in Corpus Linguistics: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 82. Stockholm, 4–8 August 1991,'' ed. by Jan Svartvik. (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991)
* "The Historical and Cultural Interpretation of Dialect," in ''American Dialect Research,'' ed. by Dennis R. Preston (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993)
* "A Pilgrim's Progress: From Philology to Linguistics," in ''First Person Singular III: Autobiographies by North American Scholars in the Language Sciences,'' edited by E.F.K. Koerner (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998)
References
External links
Dinner speech given at the 5th ICAME Conference at Windermere, England, 21 May 1984 (audio recording)
"A Tribute to W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kučera", in ''ICAME Journal'', #20 (April 1996)
* ttp://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-1718.html Pauline Jacobson, "Obituary, W. Nelson Francis," in ''Linguist List 13.1718'' (June 17, 2002)
"W. Nelson Francis, 91, professor," in ''Lancaster New Era'', June 18, 2002
{{DEFAULTSORT:Francis, W. Nelson
1910 births
2002 deaths
Brown University faculty
Linguists from the United States
Harvard College alumni
Writers from Philadelphia
University of Pennsylvania alumni
20th-century linguists