Dictionary Of American Regional English Research Articles

Folk Illusions in The Dictionary of American Regional English: Text, Context, and a Triangulation Method for Cognitive Folkloristics

We examine The Dictionary of American Regional English as a possible source for folk illusion data. Recognizing a known children’s folklore trick, ‘Jack and Jim’, as a folk illusion, we investigate the nature of the change blindness illusion featured in the form as we describe the benefits of our interdisciplinary triangulation methods for cognitive folkloristics. Ultimately, we argue that studies of decontextualized folklore texts (such as dictionary data) are bolstered by the implied contexts of shared embodied processes.

Dictionary of Smoky Mountain and Southern Appalachian English

This report describes the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain and Southern Appalachian English, a forthcoming work of lexicography based on historical principles. It discusses the dictionary's relationship to the earlier Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English and to the Dictionary of American Regional English. Setting out the scope, primary practices, purposes, and many other features of the dictionary, this report discusses how the work relies on previously untapped written and spoken sources, including Civil War letters and extensive spoken materials from an oral history project and how it seeks to capture the speech of one of America's most reputed cultural areas.

Digital DARE (Dictionary of American Regional English)

Digital DARE (Dictionary of American Regional English)

Book Review: Dictionary of American Regional English

Book Review: Dictionary of American Regional English

DARE: DOCUMENTATION AND DATING

This article begins by discussing some of the factors that determine the content of the quotation paragraphs in an historical dictionary and compares how they apply to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) and to the Oxford English Dictionary. Basic policies and how they are implemented are important, but equally important is the quality of the material you have to select from; this material includes not only the quotations already on hand, but also the potential body of quotations available to lexicographers from a variety of resources. It is this last factor that has changed radically since the earlier volumes of DARE were published, with the advent of the Internet. The rest of the article takes a statistical look at the quotation paragraphs in DARE and how they have (and have not) changed over the years in response to this and other factors, with special emphasis on the documentation of chronology.

DAREAND REGIONAL AMERICAN LEXICOGRAPHY

The recent completion of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) makes timely an assessment of its achievements and the implications for pursuing regional dictionaries of American English. Using the author’s forthcoming Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English, this article explores how DARE’s practices can instruct a regional dictionary in evaluating sources and incorporating material from three indispensable domains: the library, the field, and the mind. In illustrating lessons learned and new practices developed, the article shows how DARE, far from being the culminating work in the field, creates opportunities for smaller-scale works to benefit from its practices.

Dictionary of American regional English: v.5: Sl-Z

Dictionary of American regional English: v.5: Sl-Z

Farewell to the Founders: Major Dialect Changes Along the East-West New England Border

Hans Kurath's 1939 Linguistic Atlas of New England reported a significant east-west dialect contrast along the Green Mountains of Vermont. In 1987, using data from 1960s fieldwork for the Dictionary of American Regional English, Craig Carver found the contrast remained intact a generation later. Such results reflect the enduring influence of eighteenth-century settlers, known as the Principle of First Effective Settlement or the “Founder Effect.” To determine the current status of the east-west dialect contrast and whether the Founder Effect is still present, the authors examined 62 speakers along the border in both real and apparent time. The real-time results show that, among older speakers, Kurath's east-west line of traditional New England features has moved eastward to the state border of New Hampshire. The apparent-time results show that many traditional eastern variants are receding among younger speakers, and these linguistic changes are reflecting and constructing significant social changes occurring in this region. For about two centuries, the east-west contrasts of the early European settlements were faithfully transmitted to each new generation. But now, among the current generations of speakers, the Founder Effect in northern New England is rapidly dissipating.

Language and Vernacular Culture: Why Folklorists Should Read the <em>Dictionary of American Regional English</em>

It took fifty years to conceptualize and complete the unsurpassed Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). Renowned philologist Frederic G. Cassidy (1907–2000) served as chief editor, and Joan Houston Hall was associate editor for the first three volumes (I [A–C], 903 pages, 1985; II [D–H], 1175 pages, 1991; III [I–O], 927 pages, 1996); after the death of the untiring Cassidy at the age of ninety-three, Hall naturally became chief editor of the final two volumes (IV [P–Sk], 1014 pages, 2002; V [Sl–Z], 1244 pages, 2012). Now that this magnum opus of 5263 pages (each printed in two columns) is finished, its five massive volumes represent a unique compendium of the amazingly rich treasure trove of American regional English. Most volumes in the series appeared about every six years, though the last and largest took about ten years to produce. As Hall explains, this was primarily due to the fact that she and her co-workers decided to make extensive use of electronic sources for historical references of individual words, word pairs, and entire phrases. Be that as it may, the publishing process spanned nearly thirty years; during this slow gestation, DARE became a classic in the lexicographical registration of American regional English. The study of the American language is simply unthinkable without this unique and invaluable resource, and scholars and students

DARE —: On Beyond Zydeco

The fifth volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English , ending with zydeco , was finished last year and published this spring. Since then the project has been working on preparing material for a sixth volume of supplemental materials (geographical and social maps, an index to the entries, and lists of responses to selected questions in the DARE questionnaire), which is to appear early next year, and for a corrected and enhanced online edition of the whole work, to be launched late next year. Plans are already being made for periodic updates and revisions of the online edition, which will take advantage not only of the thousands of new citations that have already been collected, but also of the many Web resources that have become available since the first three volumes were written. Future plans include a pilot project to test the feasibility of using modern methods—Web-based questionnaires and telephone interviews—to achieve the same sort of results as the original DARE fieldwork, and a project to make the sound recordings from the original fieldwork—along with a database containing detailed content listings—available on the Web.

Canadianism, Americanism, NORTH Americanism: DARE AND DCHP AS DIALECTOLOGICAL RESEARCH TOOLS

This article approaches two repositories of lexical items, the Dictionary of American Regional English and the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, as repositories of historical dialectology. Starting with a detailed comparison of the two historical dictionairies in letter T, the authors discuss and illustrate ways to tap these resources for uses for which they were originally not intended but can be fruitfully exploited. As both dictionaries were edited by teams headed by dialectologists, Frederic Cassidy and Walter S. Avis, respectively, it is not surprising that the approach outlined here seems worthwhile of pursuit not just for the historical linguist, but also for those working on various aspects of present-day North American English. After giving recommendations for the use of the two repositories for such work, the authors highlight areas for future revisions and conclude with a section on the use of social networking in dialectological research.

John Clare's Words and Their Survival in America

Previous articleNext article No AccessWordsworth-Coleridge Association 2009John Clare's Words and Their Survival in AmericaEric H. RobinsonEric H. Robinson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 41, Number 2Spring 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24043603 Views: 1Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Dictionary of American Regional English. Vol. IV: P-Sk (review)

Reviewed by: Dictionary of American Regional English. Vol. IV: P-Sk T.K. Pratt Joan Houston Hall , chief ed. Dictionary of American Regional English. Vol. IV: P-Sk. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2002. Pp. xx + 1014. US$89.95 (hardcover). This volume is the second-last of a projected five for the magnificent DARE; the preceding volumes have also been reviewed in the Canadian Journal of Linguistics by the present writer (Pratt 1986, 1994, 1998). To take a fresh look at this dictionary's continuing strengths and minor weaknesses, I concentrate this time on a single illustrative entry, skid road, chosen for its well-known Canadian connections. The first skid road was "Yesler('s) Way", built in Seattle in 1852 for the purpose of dragging logs down to the port by skidding them on the top of other logs laid crossways. [End Page 127] The earliest date in DARE for the term itself is 1880, which pre-dates by nine years the first citation for the same term in Avis et al., A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (1967, hereafter DCHP). That a dictionary of Canadianisms and one of (regional) Americanisms can claim the same word is unremarkable, given their respective selection criteria. For DARE, a regional Americanism is, chiefly, "[a]ny word or phrase whose form or meaning is not used generally throughout the United States but only in part (or parts) of it" (vol. I, p. xvi) , while for DCHP a Canadianism is either native to Canada or "distinctively characteristic of Canadian usage though not necessarily exclusive to Canada" (p. xiii). But we might question how this non-native entry in DCHP is distinctively Canadian when its American counterpart boasts twelve sources for the primary meaning alone, including Atlantic Monthly, American Speech, the U.S. Forestry Service, a western folklore collection, two DARE fieldwork recordings, and what looks like a novel.1 Both Scargill (1977) and Parkin (1989) identify skid road as a British Columbia expression, with no hint of American usage other than the Seattle origin of the invention itself, while the Gage Canadian Dictionary (1997) calls the item "Cdn. Lumbering". Similarly, DARE's extensive citations for two other popular west-coast words—saltchuck 'sea water' and skookum 'strong'—contradict claims of distinctive Canadian-ness by DCHP, Gage, Orkin (1971), and McConnell (1979).2 Of course, none of these authors could know what has now been made available in DARE.3 My point is simply that anyone wishing to describe the vocabulary of Canadian English must consult DARE.4 At the same time, the trust engendered by this dictionary's carefully presented evidence carries assurance that such words as parkade, pogey, poutine, Red River cart, safety touch, screech, and separate school can still be labeled "Canadian", since they are not found in DARE. Skid road has a second and better-known meaning: 'disreputable area of town'. Such a district would initially have sprung up around the end of a literal skid road, to help loggers part with their earnings in hotels, bars, and brothels. Later the term was applied to any such district in any town or city. Both DARE and DCHP cover this second meaning also, but, curiously, both cite the same first source, Log of the 'Columbia' (1906), listed in the latter's bibliography as an "[i]rregular" periodical from Rock Bay, B.C.5 DARE can be faulted here, since a Canadian source is not evidence of American usage. A larger problem, albeit still a minor one in the context of the whole work, is that, far more often than it does, [End Page 128] DARE should be directing the reader to parallel evidence in other dictionaries. Without such direction one is led to infer that all the linguistic wonders on display are wholly and solely American. At some entries, to be sure—skookum is one—DCHP is noted. But it should be noted also at an entry like skid road, where the overlap is great (with the added benefit in this case of correcting the mistaken source). Another such example is the delightful entry ride and tie, describing a system whereby two people can travel cheaply using a single horse, each...

The Names of the Flowers: Ruby Hemenway's Redemption of History

Ruby M. Hemenway (1884-1987), who was declared "the oldest newspaper columnist in the universe" in a 1984 article in Yankee Magazine, specialized in the restoration of long-forgotten facts about life in late-nineteenth-century rural New England. Such knowledge included how people outfitted their sleighs with buffalo robes and how women crimped the edges of their pies. Hemenway was a major source for the Dictionary of American Regional English, owing to her nearly encyclopedic command of an antiquated local nomenclature. In one of her columns published in the Greenfield, Massachusetts, Recorder, Hemenway once offered this suggestion with regard to wildflowers: "I hope you can call them, like your friends, by name; they mean so much more." Her attention to the names of the flowers, to the anchoring of specifics of daily existence generally, is not merely antiquarianism, but rather a deliberate challenge to history as it is practiced. I argue that her writing effectively trumps the predilection for abstraction and interpretation with a preference for practical and very local knowledge as history.1

SETTLEMENT HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES AS REFLECTED INDARE:THE EXAMPLE OF GERMAN

Gesundheit, hex, bock beer with braunschweiger or bratwurst, kindergarten, come with, kaput, on the fritz, nix, angst, and wunderkind—most Americans are familiar with these words in American English. The loanwords presented in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE 1985-) reflect the settlement history of German-speaking immigrants to the United States. The 1983 tricentennial commemoration of the first settlement of immigrants in the New World passed with little general interest. It marked the 1683 settlement of Germantown, Pennsylvania, by 13 Quaker families from Krefeld, who came over on the ship Concord. 1 This was the beginning of immigration of large numbers of speakers of to the United States, which peaked in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, in the 1850s and 1860s, immigrants from German-speaking areas of Europe accounted for almost 35% of the total immigrants. Overall, from 1830 to 1930, immigration amounted to almost six million people, over 15% of the total number of immigrants to the United States (Luebke 1990, 93, 95). With so many people of German-speaking heritage in the United States, why did the tricentennial attract so little national notice? One reason, of course, is what Luebke in his book Germans in the New World calls cultural amnesia . . . greatly augmented in the twentieth century by two World Wars. But even before the twentieth century, ethnic unity among German-speaking Americans was lacking, as Luebke (1990, xiii) explains: First, to be of German origin is itself a vague and imprecise concept. German-speaking immigrants have come to America not only from Germany, but also from Austria, Hungary, Russia, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, and France. Germany as a political entity was founded only in the latter part of the nineteenth century. language and culture, which is much more important as a basis for ethnic consciousness than is country of origin, has never been congruent with nationality.

Language: A Light(er) extinguished

`After 16 Years, Dr Lighter's Lexicon, Half-Done, Still Earns Experts' Praise' Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2000 Thus the terse summation of sixteen years' work, brought to an abrupt halt, as the story that follows explains, not, for once, through the havering of a dilatory author, but by the self-defeating inability and aesthetic shortsightedness of a commercial publishing giant to follow through on a deal. I should explain: `Dr Lighter's Lexicon' is properly known as the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (RHDAS). Commissioned in 1984 to create a single-volume dictionary of American slang (a sorely needed contribution, given the manifest inadequacies of the then exemplar of the form: Robert Chapman's Dictionary of American Slang), the linguist Jonathan Lighter, tenured at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, set to work. The single volume was due for 1986 (and a deadline of that nature, even for one volume, might have warned him of problems ahead), but it would not be until 1994 that Random House were able to publish anything: volume 1, the letters A-G. In publishing terms it might have been (a) appallingly late, and (b), for all its size, only one third of the commissioned whole, but in those of lexicography it was a huge and wholly deserved success. Reviewers raved and users knew that here was an outstanding work, not merely of slang collection, but of lexicography on any level. With the exception of its equally impressive linguistic `cousin', Frederick Cassidy's Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), `Dr Lighter's Lexicon' was shaping up to be the most important essay in American dictionary-making since Webster's Third International of 1961. Lighter, whose studies of slang had commenced in 1972 when, fresh out of college, his glossary of doughboy usages from World War I became one of the longest articles ever published in the academic journal American Speech, had aimed at providing `the OED of slang'. In the light of subsequent problems, he talks of `hubris', but such is hindsight. As a fellow toiler in Dr Johnson's `lower employments of life', I can attest that this was, as the vocabulary has it, the bee's knees and indeed the veritable dog's bollocks. Based on the same `historical' method as Sir James Murray brought to the OED (i.e. with nuanced definitions underpinned by a vast range of usage citations), the RHDAS was definitely on line to stand beside its great progenitor. A second volume, bringing the headwords to `O' appeared in 1997. Since then, to widespread disappointment, not to mention an increasing sense of bewilderment, nothing. Lighter remains on post, but the dictionary, although its research is apparently completed, remains becalmed. What happened? What happened was that a commercial publisher, tied to the increasingly short-term impulses that drive such organisations, lost its bottle. The two published volumes, published respectively at $65 and $55, sold a respectable 25,000 copies between them (Lighter has received around $125,000 in advances and royalties) -- but that was not enough. Costs, claimed Random House, were simply too high. Dr Lighter has resolutely (some might suggest foolishly) eschewed the world of databases, preferring the tried-and-tested 5 by 3 card. Keyboarding his material was the first drain on resources; the making of the books (large hardbacks, excellently designed, properly sewn, on high-quality paper) weighed further on the bottom line. Random House, now a scion of the German media megacorp Bertelsmann AG, called a halt. Ironically, the flow of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (some $400,000) has also dried up: the NEH is reluctant to provide more funds in part because the work is owned by a commercial publisher. But that same commercial publisher, who are sidestepping any real discussion of the problem, have no intention of allowing the project to proceed. No further volumes are on schedule, now or in the foreseeable future. …

A LAST LECTURE

frederic g. cassidy (10 Oct. 1907-14 June 2000) was a philologist, lexicographer, and linguistic geographer whose interests encompassed the history of English, Creole languages, American English, and lexicography. He published scores of articles over a career of more than 60 years (most of it spent at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) but is probably best known for his groundbreaking Dictionary of Jamaican English (1967, 1980) and his monumental Dictionary of American Regional English (1985-).

Dictionary of American Regional English

*DARE Staff, Volume III * Preface * Acknowledgments * The Anatomy of a DARE Entry * List of Abbreviations *Dictionary of American Regional English, I--O

Dictionary of American Regional English: Volumes I-III Chief Ed., Frederic G. Cassidy, Assoc. Ed., Joan Houston Hall (review)

386LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) In spite of these shortcomings, the review of literature in this book can be useful to those not familiar with the various approaches to discourse. The application, while not always satisfying, offers some useful insights and invites others to investigate language use in dramatic contexts in new and fruitful ways. REFERENCES Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H.: E. A. Schegloff; and G. Jefferson 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turntaking for conversation. Language 50.696-735. 19 Courtney Dnve Farmingville, NY 11738 Dictionary of American Regional English: Volumes I-III. Chief Ed., Frederic G. Cassidy, Assoc. Ed., Joan Houston Hall. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Vol. I (A-C), 1985. Pp. elvi, 903. VoLII(D-H), 1991.Pp. 1175. Vol. Ill (I-O), 1996. Pp. 927. Reviewed by Ellen Johnson, Western Kentucky University Frederic Cassidy and Joan Hall are to the twentieth century what James Murray was to the nineteenth century, at least for those of us who are concerned with studying language at the microcosmic level, in its full diversity and complexity. Their multivolume work, still in progress, has already become as indispensable to the study of regionally- and socially-restricted features as the Oxford English Dictionary (upon which it is modelled) is for information on words of more general distribution. Of course, being 'restricted' in a country the size of the United States can mean a word, pronunciation, morphological or syntactic formation that is familiar to millions of people. Far from being a collection of mere oddities, the Dictionary ofAmerican Regional English (DARE) is a monument to the dynamic nature of language, its flexibility, and its infinite capacity for metaphor and innovation. The dictionary draws upon multiple sources of data, among them eighteenth-century diaries, small-town newspapers, Dialect Notes and its offspring American Speech, fiction, botanical guidebooks, linguistic atlases, tapes of aluminum disk recordings, television shows, advertisements , the Internet, and observations from linguists far and wide, folklorists, and the general public. At the core of the project are interviews systematically collected from 2,777 speakers across the United States between 1965 and 1970. This fieldwork provides a synchronic view of language variation that intersects and informs the diachronic approach ofthe editors, who provide ample evidence for etymology, diffusion, and development. Volume 1 has been reprinted; it contains information vital to linguists who wish to use the dictionary, such as the principles for inclusion of terms and principles of spelling which the editors have adopted. The text of the field questionnaire is there along with a list of interviewees and their salient characteristics (i.e. social variables and location). All citations in the entries themselves are identified so they can be traced back to this key and to a list of abbreviations. The DARE map is demystified in the front matter: Because of its distortion relative to a conventional US map, some explanation is required. The difference reflects the population density of each state and is thus analogous to showing percentages as opposed to raw numbers in a table. The computer mapping program used by the editors allows them to label expressions that cluster in any of 37 overlapping regions, variously defined by linguists (e.g. South Midland), by physical features (Rocky Mountains), or by cultural tradition (Upstate New York). The separately published index to the first two volumes (Metcalf 1993) lists entries by these regional labels as REVIEWS387 well as by social labels, usage labels (indicating pragmatic restrictions), and etymological notes regarding morphology and borrowings, from Algonquian to Yoruba. The technical information in Volume 1 is supplemented by two essays on American English, one by C noting common syntactic features of folk speech and explaining linguistic processes such as epenthesis and euphemism, and the other by James Hartman giving an overview of American English pronunciation. Neither is theoretically satisfying, with the latter, for example, simply stating, 'For the purpose of discussing phonological variation, linguistic scholarship has produced no completely satisfactory system of analysis' (xlvi). Hartmann avoids any serious consideration of the issue of phonetic versus phonemic differences, raised in Labov 1994 and elsewhere, that goes to the heart of questions about the...

The Midland “Mango” Region: A Reflection of German Channel Migration?

The phenomenon of the renaming of the common green pepper to “mango” in the Ohio Valley region is examined. Surveys were returned from 2,377 undergraduate students in 41 colleges and universities in the United States. The response revealed a concentration of knowledge of the term mango in the southern midland region in the States of Indiana and Ohio, southeastern Illinois, and an isolated spot in eastern Pennsylvania. This is a more contracted area than found from DARE (Dictionary of American Regional English) informants in the late 1960s. The name mango as applied to green peppers probably comes from a complex progression of food preparations. Comparisons with 1850 census data, county histories, contemporary atlases, and fieldwork, indicate a connection with German ethnicity. Though a lexical connection with tropical colonial/ slavery/sugar institutions was sought, such was not verified in this study.