William A. Kretzschmar, Jr.

Degree: PhD, English, University of Chicago, 1980

Title: Harry and Jane Willson Professor in Humanities, Department of English

Courses taught:

• LING 4000/6000 History of the English Language
• LING 4010/6010 American English
• LING 4080/6080 The Linguistics of Speech
• LING 4100/6100 Lexicography
• LING 4886/6886 Text and Corpus Analysis

Recent Publications:

• Standard American English Pronunciation. In A Handbook of Varieties of English, vol. 1 (Phonology), edited by Bernd Kortmann and Edgar Schneider, with Kate Burridge, Rajend Mesthrie, and Clive Upton (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005), 257-269.
• Roswell Voices, with Becky Childs, Bridget Anderson, and Sonja Lanehart. Roswell: Roswell Folk and Heritage Bureau, 2004. [booklet and CD]
• Regional Varieties of American English. In Language in the USA, 2nd ed., edited by Edward Finegan and John Rickford, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 39-57.
• Computational Techniques in Dialectometry, ed. with John Nerbonne, Computers and the Humanities 37.3 [special issue, 2003]

Dr. Kretzschmar’s major publications include the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (with Clive Upton and Rafal Konopka; Oxford U Press, 2001); Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data (with Edgar Schneider, Sage Publications, 1996); Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (with Virginia McDavid, Theodore Lerud, and Ellen Johnson; U Chicago Press, 1994). The primary outlet for his Linguistic Atlas research is the Linguistic Atlas Web site, http://us.english.uga.edu/. Current work on the Atlas pursues three primary targets: 1) creation of text-encoding and presentation format for Atlas interviews which will allow for linked text, sound, maps, and analytical information for a wide range of users; 2) advanced methods of quantitative analysis, including technical geography; and 3) creation of new field work methods which will support research in speech sciences and NLP as well as linguistic geography and sociolinguistics. He maintains an active community-language field site in Roswell, GA, which complements the survey research of the Atlas. These interests branched naturally into corpus linguistics, where he has directed corpus and text encoding activities for a large National Cancer Institute grant to study tobacco documents, and into text analysis, as shown by his special issue of Language and Literature (vol. 10.2, 2001) on literary dialect analysis with computer assistance. He served as editor of the Journal of English Linguistics for 15 years. He now serves as editor for three Linguistic Atlas projects and a board member for several others; as Georgia's institutional representative for the international Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Consortium; as an advisory board member or consultant for various professional journals and dictionaries; and as the President of the American Dialect Society (2007-2009). He prepares American pronunciations for the new online Oxford English Dictionary and the New Oxford American Dictionary line, and this has led to cooperative research into speech synthesis. He has performed consulting work over the years for forensic, industrial, and academic clients (see www.text-tech.com), with a particular specialty in large-scale automated document evaluation using the Collocational Cohesion process (patent-pending).