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"''DARE'' is a bold synthesis of linguistic atlas and historical dictionary." 〔The ''Dictionary of American Regional English'' (''DARE'') is a record of American English as spoken in the United States, from its beginnings to the present. It differs from other dictionaries in that it does not document the standard language used throughout the country. Instead, it contains regional and folk speech, those words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of the country to another, or that we learn from our families and friends rather than from our teachers and books. For ''DARE'', a "region" may be as small as a city or part of a city, or as large as most (but not all) of the country.〔Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy.''Dictionary of American Regional English'', Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985. p.xvi.〕 The ''Dictionary'' is based both on face-to-face interviews with 2,777 people carried out in 1,002 communities across the country between 1965 and 1970, and on a large collection of print and (recently) electronic materials, including diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies, government documents, and newspapers.〔Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy. ''Dictionary of American Regional English'', Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985. p.xx.〕 These sources are cited in individual entries to illustrate how the words have been used from the 17th century through the beginning of the 21st century. Entries may include pronunciations, variant forms, etymologies, and statements about regional and social distributions of words and forms. Five volumes of text were published by Harvard University Press between 1985 and 2012: Volume I (A–C), edited by Frederic G. Cassidy, appeared in 1985; Volume II (D–H), edited by Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall, was published in 1991; Volume III (I–O), by Cassidy and Hall, came out in 1996; Volume IV (P–Sk), by Hall, appeared in 2002; and Volume V (Sl–Z), with Hall as editor, finished the set in 2012. A sixth volume, subtitled “Contrastive Maps, Index to Entry Labels, Questionnaire, and Fieldwork Data,” edited by Hall with Luanne von Schneidemesser, was published early in 2013. Late that same year, the digital version was launched. ''DARE'' chronicles the language of the American people. It is used by teachers, librarians, researchers, physicians, forensic linguists, journalists, historians, and playwrights. ==History== In 1889, when Joseph Wright began editing the ''English Dialect Dictionary'', a group of American philologists founded the American Dialect Society with the ultimate purpose of producing a similar work for the United States. Members of the Society began to collect material, much of which was published in the Society's journal ''Dialect Notes'', but little was done toward compiling a dictionary recording nationwide usage until Frederic G. Cassidy was appointed Chief Editor in 1962.〔Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy.''Dictionary of American Regional English'', Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985. p.xii.〕 Cassidy had done fieldwork in Wisconsin for the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States project and in Jamaica for his ''Dictionary of Jamaican English''. With the assistance of Audrey Duckert, he had also designed and administered an intensive mail-questionnaire survey of Wisconsin (the ''Wisconsin English Language Survey'').〔Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy.''Dictionary of American Regional English'', Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985. p.xii.〕 Drawing on this experience, he and Duckert made plans for a nationwide, fieldworker-administered questionnaire that would provide a comprehensive foundation for the projected ''Dictionary''. The fieldwork, supported by a grant from the Office of Education, was conducted during 1965-70. About eighty fieldworkers (mostly graduate students, but also some professors) were trained in phonetic transcription and fieldwork techniques; they were then sent to 1,002 carefully selected communities across the country, chosen to reflect population density and to account for settlement history and immigration patterns.〔Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy.''Dictionary of American Regional English'', Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985. p.xii-xiii.〕 Each fieldworker was required to find "informants," people willing to provide information about words, who were natives of their communities and who had lived there all, or almost all, their lives. The informants were then asked to answer the questions in the ''DARE'' questionnaire. In many communities more than one person contributed answers, so the total number of informants, 2,777, is much larger than the number of communities.〔Hall, Joan Houston. "The Dictionary of American Regional English." ''Language in the USA: Perspectives for the 21st Century''. Eds. Edward Finegan, John Rickford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. p.95.〕 While the fieldworkers were interviewing people across the country, Cassidy and others in Madison organized an extensive volunteer reading program. Printed materials of all kinds were selected and sent to volunteers, who read them and identified regional words in context. These resources included historical and contemporary newspapers, diaries, letters, histories, biographies, novels, and government documents. A number of important unpublished collections of dialect materials were also donated to ''DARE'' for use in documenting the ''Dictionary'' entries.〔Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy.''Dictionary of American Regional English'', Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985. p.xv.〕 As the fieldworkers sent their questionnaires back to Madison, the approximately 2.3 million answers were keypunched, and software was written to create a question-by-question tabulation of responses as well as an index.〔Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy.''Dictionary of American Regional English'', Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985. p.xiv-xv.〕 In addition, programs were written that allowed the interactive creation of maps showing where the responses were found and the production of statistical tables itemizing the age, sex, race, education level, and community type for each person who gave a particular response. These tools allow ''DARE'' editors to apply regional labels to entries based on where words were collected in the fieldwork project and to use social labels describing individuals who use those words.〔Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy.''Dictionary of American Regional English'', Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985. p.xx.〕 In 1974, Cassidy contracted with Harvard University Press to publish the Dictionary, and editing began in earnest in 1975. By 1980 it was clear that the idea of writing and publishing ''DARE'' as a single unit was impossible. Early estimates of the time it would take to write and revise entries had been overly optimistic. Following the tradition of other historical dictionaries such as the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', ''DARE'' decided to publish each volume as it was ready. Because Cassidy had contracted to supply the text of the ''Dictionary'' on magnetic tape fully coded for typesetting, with camera-ready maps, a production department had to be set up. A system was devised for coding the many specifications for format, type size and style, and special characters. Procedures were worked out for the meticulous checking and correcting of text that would be required. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Dictionary of American Regional English」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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