13.1718, All: Obituary, W. Nelson Francis

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-13-1718. Mon Jun 17 2002. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 13.1718, All: Obituary, W. Nelson Francis

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U.<aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Dry, Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>

Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org):
	Simin Karimi, U. of Arizona
	Terence Langendoen, U. of Arizona

Consulting Editor:
        Andrew Carnie, U. of Arizona <carnie at linguistlist.org>

Editors (linguist at linguistlist.org):
	Karen Milligan, WSU 		Naomi Ogasawara, EMU
	James Yuells, EMU		Marie Klopfenstein, WSU
	Michael Appleby, EMU		Heather Taylor, EMU
	Ljuba Veselinova, Stockholm U.	Richard John Harvey, EMU
	Dina Kapetangianni, EMU		Renee Galvis, WSU
	Karolina Owczarzak, EMU

Software: John Remmers, E. Michigan U. <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>
          Gayathri Sriram, E. Michigan U. <gayatri at linguistlist.org>

Home Page:  http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.



Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karen at linguistlist.org>
 ==========================================================================


=================================Directory=================================

1)
Date:  Mon, 17 Jun 2002 12:41:00 +0000
From:  Pauline Jacobson <pauline_jacobson at brown.edu>
Subject:  W. Nelson Francis

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 17 Jun 2002 12:41:00 +0000
From:  Pauline Jacobson <pauline_jacobson at brown.edu>
Subject:  W. Nelson Francis

	I am sorry to report the death of W. Nelson Francis this past
Friday (June 14).  Nelson died at home in Providence, at the age of
91.

	Nelson taught at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster,
Pa until coming to the Department of Lingusitics at Brown in 1962.  He
was instrumental in the building of linguistics at Brown, and was
Chair of the department until 1968 until 1975.  After "retiring" in
1975 he nonetheless continued to be active in the department, and in
1987 we drafted him to come back and be Chair of the Department of
Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences.  He continued to teach historical
linguistics at Brown until the early 1990's, when we finally let him
"retire" a second time.  But he continued to be active in the field
until quite recently - doing research, attending conferences, and
writing book reviews for the journal Language.

	Nelson was the co-creator - with Henry Kucera - of the Brown
Corpus.  This pioneering work was instrumental in the development of
the field of Corpus Linguistics, and has had a major impact on the
research directions and techniques in Computational linguistics.
Nelson was also a leading expert on the history of English and on
Dialectology, and was author of, among others, The Structure of
American English; The English Language: An Introduction; and
Dialectology: An Introduction.

	He was a true "Renaissance man" with a variety of interests.
He was an avid sailor, and lived for many years on the Narragansett
Bay where he regularly sailed.  He was also a member of Save the Bay,
the NAACP, and the Urban League of Rhode Island, and was president of
the Providence Shakespearean Society from 1986 to 1990.

	Nelson had a great joie-de-vivre, and was a wonderful
colleague and a wonderful man.  He is survived by his wife Nearlene,
two sons, a daughter, and two grandchildren.  There will be a memorial
service held at a later date.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-13-1718