SPEED (Spoken English in Early Dialects)

This project aims to digitise and evaluate the six volumes of Joseph Wright`s English Dialect Dictionary (1898 - 1905), a lexicographic milestone that focuses on English dialect terms as used in the 18th and 19th century. 100 years after its first publication, Wright`s EDD remains the most comprehensive and reliable work on this topic, even surpassing the famous Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in its treatment of dialectal forms. The digitisation of the OED has recently shown the great potential of electronic reference works, with sophisticated search engines allowing for the instant retrieval of the formal and semantic aspects of lexemes and of complex lexical combinations that could not possibly be retrieved manually. The first stage of our project is dedicated to the technical challenges of digitising Wright`s EDD. Our intended collaboration with computer experts from the University of Innsbruck guarantees the compilation of a highly advanced electronic database that can be searched for any information the dictionary includes, of course also allowing the combination of various search parameters. This multi-level accessibility of the EDD is also most important for the unavoidable task of proofreading. We have scheduled eight months for the initial phase of creating the electronic version of the dictionary, followed by the main task of interpreting the database linguistically. This linguistic evaluation will above all concern the fields of Historical English, Spoken English and English Dialectology, all somewhat neglected study areas which can greatly benefit from the immense amount of data to be retrieved from an electronic version of the EDD. Within these fields our scholarly investigations will concentrate on topics such as phraseology, idiomaticity, rhyme and alliteration, syllable structure, suprasegmentals, sociolinguistic patterns as well as questions of metaphor, deixis, and various other features of the spoken language. We are planning the publication of a number of articles, monographs and dissertations as well as the organisation of an international conference in Innsbruck. The excellent contacts of the applicants with distinguished colleagues of the fields concerned can be expected to serve as the basis for many fruitful collaborations. By promoting science at the borderline between basic and applied research, the Translational Research Programme (TRP) seems to be the ideal financial supporter for our ambitious project SPEED. Once compiled, our database could easily be made available to colleagues worldwide, thus becoming the groundwork for further international research on the history of spoken and dialectal English between 1700 and 1900.

This project aims to digitise and evaluate the six volumes of Joseph Wright`s English Dialect Dictionary (1898 - 1905), a lexicographic milestone that focuses on English dialect terms as used in the 18th and 19th century. 100 years after its first publication, Wright`s EDD remains the most comprehensive and reliable work on this topic, even surpassing the famous Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in its treatment of dialectal forms. The digitisation of the OED has recently shown the great potential of electronic reference works, with sophisticated search engines allowing for the instant retrieval of the formal and semantic aspects of lexemes and of complex lexical combinations that could not possibly be retrieved manually. The first stage of our project is dedicated to the technical challenges of digitising Wright`s EDD. Our intended collaboration with computer experts from the University of Innsbruck guarantees the compilation of a highly advanced electronic database that can be searched for any information the dictionary includes, of course also allowing the combination of various search parameters. This multi-level accessibility of the EDD is also most important for the unavoidable task of proofreading. We have scheduled eight months for the initial phase of creating the electronic version of the dictionary, followed by the main task of interpreting the database linguistically. This linguistic evaluation will above all concern the fields of Historical English, Spoken English and English Dialectology, all somewhat neglected study areas which can greatly benefit from the immense amount of data to be retrieved from an electronic version of the EDD. Within these fields our scholarly investigations will concentrate on topics such as phraseology, idiomaticity, rhyme and alliteration, syllable structure, suprasegmentals, sociolinguistic patterns as well as questions of metaphor, deixis, and various other features of the spoken language. We are planning the publication of a number of articles, monographs and dissertations as well as the organisation of an international conference in Innsbruck. The excellent contacts of the applicants with distinguished colleagues of the fields concerned can be expected to serve as the basis for many fruitful collaborations. By promoting science at the borderline between basic and applied research, the Translational Research Programme (TRP) seems to be the ideal financial supporter for our ambitious project SPEED. Once compiled, our database could easily be made available to colleagues worldwide, thus becoming the groundwork for further international research on the history of spoken and dialectal English between 1700 and 1900.