Under the direction of Dr. William Kretzschmar, Mr. Lamont Antieau will collect linguistic data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct dialectology research on Western American English with particular focus on Colorado due to its status as the cultural center of the Rocky Mountain region. The project will elicit speech from representative speakers of various parts of the state and then analyze the linguistic forms found therein. A combination of tools used by dialect geographers will inform the research (e.g., more traditional methods like maps, as well as more recent innovations like computers and statistical testing). The newer tools will enable researchers to examine all levels of language, including syntax.
The project has broad significance. Since the collected speech will be transcribed and made publicly available via the Linguistic Atlas website (http://us.english.uga.edu), researchers will be able to use the data for a wide range of investigations into language change. These include comparing the data collected for this project to older data sets, and studying dialectal variation between Colorado and other regions in the United States as well as variation within the Colorado corpus. The interviews will elicit names for objects because this is an area in which there is a great deal of variation between regions. So the data may also be useful to anthropologists and historians. In addition to what the project will teach us about the speech of Colorado and how it compares to speech elsewhere in the United States, this research will contribute to a better understanding of dialect in general and inform theoretical models of language and culture.
