The Lags Concordance

T HROUGH CONTINUED SUPPORT of the Research Materials Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Emory University, the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) concordance was completed in October, 1983. After terminal proofreading, correction, and transfer from the mainframe at Emory, the computer tape will generate the full concordance on microfiche to be distributed jointly by University Microfilms International and the University of Georgia Press. Within the atlas design, the concordance serves as the central reference. It stands midway between the Basic Materials (figure 1), published by UMI in 1981, and the descriptive materials to be published by the University of Georgia Press (beginning in 1984 or 1985 with the first two volumes, the LAGS handbook, and the general index). The concordance provides an exhaustive record of all protocol texts permuted at word level, the substance of the general index, and the word list for the legendry. The final descriptive volumes will include a phonology, grammar, and word geography of the Gulf States, map legends in the format of a historical dictionary, and the maps themselves-those graphic representations of Southern speech that will make this general dialect survey a linguistic atlas. During the past three years, we executed the plan outlined in Working Paper No. 9, published in the Basic Materials in 1981. Those conversion rules were developed in consultation with Ronald Wood of the Emory Computer Center andJohn Nitti of the University of Wisconsin. The rules provide a consistent method for transliteration of all LAGS phonetic notation into conventional orthography. Transmitted to the mainframe with CRTs, those 1,250,000 orthographic strings were parsed and alphabetized. An orthographic string is a converted protocol entry, the output of a discrete phonological string, usually bound by terminal juncture. It may be a word, such as everywhere; a phrase, have to whip you; an incoherent surface structure that reflects a complicated underlying form, such asfirst mamma what died and had another sister; a subordinate clause with a deleted copula, such as when meat no good; or an independent structure, a syntactic free form, such as that's what it are, a magnolia. When permuted, the full set of orthographic strings will produce more than three million entries in the published concordance. Three sets of permutations from a single protocol illustrate the format

Concordance · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Medicine · Internal Medicine