Director: 

Originally Lee Pederson, now William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.

Status of work:
Fieldwork complete, consisting of audio tapes.  Words and phrases have been transcribed, but not full interviews. Audio digitized and available on LAP Web site.


Areas covered:
Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.


Subjects:
914 speakers were recorded from 1968-1983.  The informants were carefully stratified by location, age, education, sex, and race in order to create a quota sample.


Nature of recordings:
Based on a 104 page questionnaire in the Linguistic Atlas format with revisions made by Pederson to capture specific southern speech characteristics. Interviews are variable in interviewer style and formality, with the best ones containing much conversation and narrative.


Archives:
University Microfilms International (now ProQuest) published many basic materials in microform:   A Manual for Dialect Research in the Southern States (245 pages) describes the research methodology and the interviewing format used for the project; Identification tables (300-500 pages) that provide data on the people interviewed and on community networks; Idiolect Synopses (1,118 pages) summarize in phonetic transcription the unique findings of each interview and highlight the dialect variances related to specific word groups and concepts; Protocols (126,000 pages) present phonetic transcriptions of each of the 1,118 field interviews arranged on coded sheets that identify the question group; and Concordance, which converts phonetic strings into orthographic strings.  Original records are maintained in the Special Collections Department of the Emory University Library. Copies of most tapes are also maintained at the University of Georgia Library. Digitizations prepared and held at the University of Georgia.


Selected bibliography:

Kretzschmar, William A., Jr. 1998. Analytical Procedure and Three Technical Types of Dialect.  In Montgomery and Nunnally 1998, 167-85.

McDaniel, Susan L. 1989. Databases of the LAGS automatic atlas. Journal of English Linguistics 22:63-68.

Montgomery, Michael, and Thomas Nunnally, eds. 1998. From the Gulf States and Beyond: the Legacy of Lee Pederson and LAGS. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Pederson, Lee.  1983.  East Tennessee Folk Speech.  Bamberger Beitrage, 12.  Frankfurt: Lang.

Pederson, Lee.  1986.  A Graphic Plotter Grid.  Journal of English Linguistics 19:25-41.

Pederson, Lee.  1988.  Electronic Matrix Maps.  Journal of English Linguistics 21:149-74.

Pederson, Lee. 1995.  Elements of Word Geography.  Journal of English Linguistics 23:33-46.

Pederson, Lee, Susan L. McDaniel, and Carol M. Adams, eds. 1986-93. Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States. 7 vols. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.


 

Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States

(LAGS)

Atlas Projects

     LAGS

      DASS

      LAMSAS

      LANCS

      LANE

      LAO

      LAPNW

      LAPC      

      LAWS (LARMS)

      LAUM

      Roswell Voices

      Augusta

      ATLSP

      GDS

      Gullah

      SKNP

     Southern England

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