W. Nelson Francis
| W. Nelson Francis | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Winthrop Nelson Francis October 23, 1910 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | June 14, 2002 (aged 91) Providence, Rhode Island |
| Resting place | Lowell Cemetery, Lowell, Massachusetts |
| Occupation | Writer, professor, linguist |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
Harvard University University of Pennsylvania |
| Genre | Nonfiction; reference |
| Subject | Linguistics |
| Notable works | Brown Corpus |
| Spouse | Anne Funkhouser Nearlene Burkley |
| Children | 3 |
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W. Nelson Francis, Ph.D. (October 23, 1910 – June 14, 2002) was an American author, linguist, and university professor. He served as a member of the faculties of Franklin & Marshall College and Brown University, where he specialized in English and corpus linguistics. He is known for his work compiling a text collection entitled the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, which he completed with Henry Kučera.
Winthrop Nelson Francis was born on October 23, 1910 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Both of his parents were from New England. His mother was raised in Calais, Maine. His mother attended Wellesley College and taught public school in Boston, before marrying Francis' father and moving to Philadelphia. His father, Joseph Sidney Francis, was a mathematician and engineer. Francis grew up in the Germantown area of Philadelphia, where he attended the Charles W. Henry Public School and Penn Charter School.
He earned an undergraduate degree in 1931 from Harvard University, where he majored in Literature, focusing on the study of English, Greek, Latin, and French. He later attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his Ph.D. in English in 1937. His doctoral thesis presented a 14th-century Middle English text, edited by him with an extensive introduction about the textual editing. In 1939, professor and Middle English scholar Carleton Brown read his dissertation and took it to England and presented it to Mabel Day of the Early English Text Society. In 1942, the manuscript was published by the Oxford University Press.
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