The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 67, July 1963 - April, 1964 Page: 160
672 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
and pertained almost exclusively to vocabulary. Since funds were
not available for fieldworkers, Professor Atwood solved the prob-
lem by permitting some of his seniors and graduate students at
the University of Texas to try vocabulary field work in their home
communities as term projects in their courses. The results were
gratifying. Colleagues in other colleges and universities in the
Southwest tried the questionnaires with their students and
helped in the organization of field work.
Informants were selected who knew at least something about
rural life, who were lifelong or long-time residents in the same
area, and who were old enough to remember nonmechanized days.
The vast majority were English-speaking Anglo-Americans over
fifty years of age, but enough younger people were interviewed to
reveal evidence of obsolescence and innovation, and tables are
given showing increasing and decreasing frequencies together with
an interesting discussion of the reasons for vocabulary changes.
Of the 468 field records available, 322 are from Texas, the
others being from Oklahoma, Louisiana, southern Arkansas, and
southern New Mexico. Use was also made of theses and disserta-
tions concerned with vocabulary in small areas. Professor Atwood
explains in detail how 273 of the Texas field records, well dis-
tributed over the state, were put into organized shape by IBM
machines to obtain such information as every occurrence of every
word, the part of the state where each informant lived, his age,
sex, language background, and education. An operator was able
to punch cards from the edited workbooks. Various IBM machines
arranged the cards, grouped together and alphabetized all re-
sponses to a single item, and kept running counts of the occur-
rences of a word as well as the occurrences of the word in each
section of the state and in each age group. As many runs were
made as necessary to obtain the most useful classification of
materials.
There are sixteen full-page illustrations showing such things as
geographic areas of Texas, sources of settlement, Latin and
Negro population, and the production of cattle, sheep, cotton,
corn, and oil. There are 125 full-page maps indicating the geo-
graphical distribution of words or groups of words in Texas and
parts of the four adjoining states named above. A few of the160o
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 67, July 1963 - April, 1964, periodical, 1964; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101197/m1/182/: accessed May 6, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.