Academics Following his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, Francis joined the faculty of
Franklin & Marshall College, where he taught English. In 1957, he headed a faculty committee, which re-evaluated the college's curriculum. The following year, he was named chair of the English department. His first book,
The Structure of American English, was published in 1958. His scholarly work on varieties of English additionally included compiling, writing, and editing an edition of the 14th-century
Book of Vices and Virtues for the Early English Text Society. He was honored with a
Fulbright Research Fellowship and conducted field research in
Norfolk, England, between 1956 and 1957 for the
Survey of English Dialects, which was being compiled at the
University of Leeds. In 1962, he joined the faculty of
Brown University as a professor of Linguistics and English. In 1964, he began working on a joint language project of Brown University and
Tougaloo College, which lasted through 1968. The project applied linguistic principles in a syllabus of Standard American English for African-American freshmen at Tougaloo College. After the project was completed, he became the chair of the linguistics department, serving in that capacity through 1976. While he officially retired at that time with the title of Emeritus Professor, he continued to teach historical and comparative linguistics and advise students. In 1987, he was appointed chair of Brown's newly established Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences. He taught his last course at Brown in 1990.
Writing ;
Brown Corpus After joining the faculty of Brown, Francis took a course in computational linguistics from Henry Kučera, who taught as a member of the Slavic Department staff. In the early 1960s, they began collaborating on compiling a one-million-word computerized cross-section of American English, which was entitled the
Brown Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English, but commonly known as the
Brown Corpus. The work was compiled between 1963 and 1964, using books, magazines, newspapers, and other edited sources of informative and imaginative prose published in 1961. Once completed, the
Brown Corpus was published in 1964. Each word in the corpus is
tagged with its part of speech and the subject matter category of its source. Disseminated throughout the world, the
Brown Corpus has served as a model for similar projects in other languages and as the basis for numerous scholarly studies, including Francis and Kučera's
Frequency Analysis of English Usage, which was published in 1967. ;Magazine and journal contributions Francis wrote articles that were published in
American Speech,
College Composition and Communication,
College English,
Computers and the Humanities,
Contemporary Psychology,
East Anglian Magazine,
English Journal,
The Explicator,
Language,
Language in Society,
Lingua,
Modern Language Notes,
PMLA,
The Quarterly Journal of Speech,
Speculum,
Style, and
Word.
Business In 1977, Francis cofounded the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (
ICAME) at the
University of Oslo. The organization became the distributor of the
Brown Corpus. Corporate publications entitled
ICAME News and
ICAME Journal have been dedicated to him twice. In 1986, the newsletter recognized his work on an individual basis, while ten years later, the journal published "A Tribute to W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kučera".
Speaking Francis served as a keynote speaker, lecturer, and visiting professor in London;
Edinburgh;
Cairo; Tokyo; and
Trondheim, Norway. He also participated in a Nobel Symposium on computer corpus linguistics in
Stockholm. == Board memberships ==