FW: Death of W. Nelson Francis

[Grant Barrett]

This message has just been received; I have already answered his query and
so post the message here in lieu of a true announcement. I have copied a
post to LinguistList which includes more information.

Reply-To: John Francis <71600.300 at compuserve.com>
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 08:16:05 -0400
To: gbarrett at americandialect.org
Subject: Death of W. Nelson Francis

My father, W. Nelson Francis, a long-time member of the American Dialect
Society, died on June 14 in Providence, RI. Would you inform me which
office(s) and publication(s) of the ADS should be notified, with postal
and e-mail addresses and phone numbers? Thank you.

John Francis
71600.300 at compuserve.com

.........

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.