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"Labov, William"
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Labov, William (1927–2024)
This article summarizes William Labov’s contributions to linguistics. A version of this piece was originally published in 2001 in the Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics.
Journal Article
Finding out about children’s language
LVC is publishing this long inaccessible paper, a forceful instance of Labov’s ever-innovative approach to field work, commitment to social justice, and consistent efforts to defend the speakers of speech varieties that have been labeled as inadequate and even nonexistent. The largest group is concerned with the current Hawaiian pidgin spoken by young people of school age, and the transition between this Hawaiian pidgin and standard English. When you first approach the teaching of reading, you have to decide whether you know enough about the child’s language resources to use what is known as the “language experience” approach. The child is typically confronted with a picture or an object and told, “Tell me everything you can about this!” This method is one of the natural products of educational psychology, which is concerned more with discriminating among children than finding out what a given child’s capacity actually is.
Journal Article
Labov
William Labov (b. 1927) has been a driving force in linguistics for over four decades. Throughout North America, and in much of the rest of the world, his name is synonymous with sociolinguistics. This new Guide for the Perplexed summarizes Labov's work in a number of subfields, including historical linguistics, discourse analysis and not least sociolinguistics. It also sketches a broader context for appreciating Labov's major innovations. His considerable and growing legacy is discussed with comparative glances to other ways of approaching language within linguistics and in neighboring disciplines. Since the publication of The Social Stratification of English in New York City in 1966, Labov has pushed the boundaries of sociolinguistics decade after decade but there has been no one volume guide to his work. This is that guide.
eBook
Peaks Beyond Phonology: Adolescence, Incrementation, and Language Change
What is the mechanism by which a linguistic change advances across successive generations of speakers? We explore this question by using the model of incrementation provided in Labov 2001 and analyzing six current changes in English. Extending Labov's focus on recent and vigorous phonological changes, we target ongoing morphosyntactic(-semantic) and discourse-pragmatic changes. Our results provide a striking validation of the incrementation model, confirming its value as a key to understanding the evolution of linguistic systems. However, although our findings reveal the predicted peak in the apparent-time progress of a change and corroborate the female tendency to lead innovation, there is no absolute contrast between men and women with respect to incrementation. Instead, quantitative differences in the social embedding of linguistic change correlate with the rate of the change in the speech community.
Journal Article
Why the Principle of No Synonymy is Overrated
The formulation of Goldberg’s oft-quoted Principle of No Synonymy is one of the factors responsible for a shift away in attention from alternations as postulated in the generative transformational tradition towards a view that regards the so-called alternatives as conveying different meanings and thus not being real alternatives. The rejection of the generativist position, in which one variant was regarded as primary and the other as derived from the primary variant, is of course justified and necessary in a cognitive linguistic approach, but it will be argued in this paper that the Principle of No Synonymy – if regarded as a dogma – is misleading in that it bears the risk of missing important generalisations across different patterns of the same verb. Furthermore, it will be argued that both linguistic variation and pre-emption are not perfectly compatible with the Principle of No Synonymy.
Journal Article
The /ay/ diphthong in a Martha's Vineyard community: What can we say 40 years after Labov?
This article revisits Labov's (1962,
1972a) germinal sociolinguistic work on Martha's Vineyard
speech, providing a synchronic analysis of the /ay/
diphthong in words like right and time, and,
in turn, a diachronic perspective on a sound change in progress.
Labov observed that the first element of the /ay/ diphthong
was raised in the speech of Martha's Vineyarders, particularly
fishermen, and he correlated it with social factors like identity
(i.e., local heritage) and resistance to summer visitors. The
present authors provide a sociolinguistic analysis of /ay/
from a new set of data collected in a Martha's Vineyard
speech community. The outcome suggests a change in the linguistic
pattern observed by Labov, which the authors argue is linked
to socio-economic restructuring and resulting ideological changes
taking place on the island. The acoustic and social factors
are analyzed using VARBRUL to show how /ay/ variation
today patterns with various internal and external factors found
to be salient in Labov's earlier study.
Journal Article
Colonial dialect contact in the history of European languages: On the irrelevance of identity to new-dialect formation
It is often supposed that dialect contact and dialect mixture were involved in the development of new colonial varieties of European languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese, Canadian French, and Australian English. However, while no one has denied that dialect contact took place, the role of dialect mixture has been disputed. Among those who do not accept a role for it, some have also considered the role of identity, especially new national identities, to be self-evident. This article argues for the role of dialect mixture and against the role of identity. It presents case studies from pre-16th-century colonial expansions of European languages, an era when any role for national identities would be very hard to argue for. Instead, it suggests that dialect mixture is the inevitable result of dialect contact, and that the mechanism which accounts for this is quasi-automatic accommodation in face-to-face interaction.NOTE: Very many thanks for help with this article go to David Britain, Brian Joseph, Lesley Milroy, James Milroy, and especially Max Wheeler.
Journal Article
Horsing around Again: Poetics and Intention in Oral Narrative Performance
In this article I compare two accounts by the same narrator of the same event separated by forty-two years, one enclosed in a personal letter and the other an unrehearsed, voiced text. Comparison offers the opportunity to examine transformations in story form from one medium to another. These transformations demonstrate the importance of thematic and emotional as well as linguistic parallelism in oral narrative performance, and they complicate our understanding of personal narrative as distinct from traditional storytelling forms. My own reinterpretation of the emotional core of the story calls attention to the shifting subject positions of narrators who conjure an earlier self in their storytelling.
Journal Article