Delbridge, Arthur

Extract copied from an obituary written by Emeritus Professor Philip Newall, Macquarie University paying tribute to Arthur Delbridge:

Arthur Delbridge began his distinguished academic career at Sydney University, attaining first-class honours and the university medal in 1941, and subsequently committed himself to war service from 1942 to 1945, including a period in Borneo. He returned to postgraduate training at the Sydney Teachers College, and spent a year as a country teacher in Cootamundra. In 1948 he was appointed a lecturer at the Armidale Teachers College, where he won an Imperial Relations Trust Fellowship to travel to the UK to complete an MA at the University of London from 1950 to 1952. On returning he taught again at the Sydney Teachers College, and by 1955 had been appointed as lecturer at the then Institute of Technology, which became the University of New South Wales.

In 1958 Arthur took up a lectureship in the English Department at Sydney University, where he developed wide research interests in English linguistics, including phonetics, lexicography, grammar, stylistics and language variation, especially Australian English. During the 1960s he undertook (with colleague Professor Alex Mitchell) a ground-breaking study of the Australian accent and its distribution among 7000 high school students in all states. It remains the largest research study of its kind, and its data was so outstanding in its quality that it was digitised in the 1990s and is now incorporated in the Australian National Corpus. This research on the speech of Australian adolescents was remarkable also in relating socioeconomic data to the students’ recordings, and identifying the differences between typical city and country accents. It thus laid the foundations for sociolinguistic research in Australia.

In 1966 Arthur was appointed as the foundation Professor of English (language and linguistics) at the newly established Macquarie University, where he developed major courses of study in English linguistics.

[accessed at https://www.mq.edu.au/thisweek/archives/2014/10/vale-professor-arthur-delbridge/#.XruqumgzYuU on 13/05/2020]