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Labov: Language Variation and Change
Labov: Language Variation and Change
2.1 INTRODUCTION
The full impact of a scholar like William Labov
(pronounced [l@bov]) is beyond the scope of
a handbook chapter. The entire Handbook of
Language Variation and Change (Chambers,
Trudgill and Schilling-Estes, 2002) should be seen
as part of Labovs scholarly impact, and even that
one volume does not comprehensively capture
every aspect of his work. His publications are
voluminous, their range is broad, and their effects
on current scholars continue. This chapter focuses
primarily, although not exclusively, on the early
works of Labov. At points, I also trace the connections of Labovs scholarship to that of his intellectual predecessors, illustrating his motivations for
scholarship. The chapter is divided into sections on
Labovs education and personal background, the
intellectual influences on his scholarship, the confluence of academic fields around the beginnings
of sociolinguistics, an overview of Labovs work,
and a conclusion.1
physical fights with local kids. From these encounters, he sharpened his argumentative skills, learned
to take note of what was around him, and kept
swinging at what he was good at winning verbal
arguments. He later studied at Harvard and
majored in English and philosophy, graduating in
1948. In How I got into linguistics, Labov
(1997) writes about his advisors comments at
Harvard: When he learned that I was taking one
course in chemistry (inorganic), he sucked on his
pipe, smoothed out his cord trousers, and said,
Just where did you get this idolatry of science?
These scientific leanings fostered Labovs efforts
to make language study an empirical enterprise.
Labov (1997) reports that he held several writing jobs after college, then went to work as an
industrial chemist and ink-maker in the laboratory
of the Union Ink Co. in Ridgefield, NJ, between
1949 and 1960. There he interacted with a wide
diversity of company workers, from millhands to
truck drivers and sales crew, figuring out how
much everyone knew, learning how they argued,
and studying their narratives years before he
thought of writing about them.
In 1961, aged 34, he went back to graduate
school at Columbia University in New York City
with an idea to study English. Allen Walker Read
was Labovs first linguistics teacher, and Labov
argues (2006: 16) that Reads papers on OK
(Read, 2002) stand as a progenitor of sociohistorical work. He was intrigued with linguistics
because of the vibrancy of the field and linguists
propensity for open argument. What dismayed
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graduate hours needed to train students in linguistics to produce the scholars required to follow in
the footsteps of Dell Hymes, John Gumperz,
Emmanuel Schegloff and Erving Goffman (Shuy,
1990: 187)? The divide between academic disciplines can be seen in the names the sociology of
language and sociolinguistics, where the sociology of language denoted sociology done through
the means of language and sociolinguistics
denoted linguistics done while maintaining a
focus on social factors. Such distinctions were
present at the time Labov was entering graduate
school: For example, Shuy (1990: 188) reports
that Joshua Fishman first taught a Sociology of
Language course in 1956 at the University of
Pennsylvania.
Labov originally argued against the name
sociolinguistics, but he recognizes the utility of
the term today (Gordon, 2006: 335): ... it turns
out that its useful to approach the field through a
subfield; most linguists want to have some form of
sociolinguistics taught in their department.
Although the term sociolinguistics is no longer a
point of objection for Labov, he reserves the label
variation and change for the type of linguistics
he practices:
But today, it seems the actual field were talking
about is best called the study of variation and
change. Sociolinguistics is a large and unformed
area with many different ways of approaching the
subject that arent necessarily linguistic, whereas
the study of variation and change describes pretty
well the enterprise were engaged in.
expect that linguistics, sociology, and anthropology will all show the effects. It is a safe assessment to note that linguistics has had significant
programmatic effects from this rapid development. For example, it is now common for major
review panels to include a sociolinguist: the advisory panel for the National Science Foundation
linguistics programme has a sociolinguistic seat,
as does the editorial panel for the Linguistic
Society of Americas journal Language.
At the 1964 Sociolinguistics Conference,
McDavid also presented on dialect differences in
urban society in general, and Greenville, SC, and
Chicago, IL, specifically. A perusal of McDavids
paper and Labovs paper of the same volume provides a succinct comparison of the methodological and rhetorical changes made in the transition
from traditional dialectology to variationist sociolinguistics. McDavids paper is a dialectological
narrative, highlighting his own personal judgments of the varieties in question; Labovs paper
is based on an empirically-driven statistical analysis. Even though they appear adjacent to each
other in print, the two papers seem to be from different decades. Like McDavid, others were concerned with urban dialects before Labov. Pederson
(1964) had investigated Chicago using dialectologist methods as used by Kurath and McDavid, but
Labovs method for integrating social information
and linguistic analysis ultimately resonated more
deeply with a wider scholarly audience.
Early commentators noted that Labovs
approaches covered numerous fields. In regard to
his work with English in the schools, A. Hood
Roberts comments that his work combines the
insights offered by linguistics as well as sociology, pedagogy, and psychology (Labov, 1969c:
iii). Linguists interested in the language of real
people and the accountability of theory to data
hailed Labovs work and followed suit. The intellectual environment in which Labov presented his
version of linguistics was ready for change. Labov
comments:
I found that there were many people who were
ready for this approach, not only the quantitative
approach but were ready to take social context
into effect. That doesnt mean that it suddenly
became the mainstream of linguistics, far from it.
The approach that we follow in NWAV is still only
a part and not at all the dominant part of linguistic
studies (Gordon, 2006: 335).
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community, and hence language, from a new perspective. Additionally, Labov provides the results
from experiments designed to assess the social
evaluation of language by NYC residents. Labov
emphasizes that experiments are needed to study
normative behaviour, necessary to understand the
grammar of the speech community in an effort to
study language change.
That any variable form (a member of a set of alternative ways of saying the same thing) should be
reported with the proportion of cases in which the
form did occur in the relevant environment, compared to the total number of cases in which it
might have occurred.
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2.8 CONCLUSION
As seen in his most recent interview (Gordon,
2006: 338), Labov continues to search for the
comprehensive principles he can find for language: for example, principles of chain shifting
(Labov, 1994: 116) or social principles such as
the Nonconformity Principle (Labov, 2001: 516).
The impact of Labovs efforts should also be
assessed by their effect on how linguistic scholarship is conducted. Perhaps the most rewarding
component of his legacy has been his impact on
his students at the University of Pennsylvania
and the many students he has assisted from around
the world. Labovs former students are themselves highly productive and innovative language
scholars.
Despite his sweeping influence as teacher and
scholar, the conglomerate field of sociolinguistics
is not uniformly a Labovian field. In the introduction to Volume I of the Principles of Linguistic
Change, Labov remarks that his view of theorizing may not be in line with that of other students
of sociolinguistics who argue for a sociolinguistic
theory. Labov (1994: 4) does not attempt to model
all possible relations between past and present
language systems, but leans towards approaches
in sciences like biology and geology, proceeding
... steadily from the known to the unknown,
enlarging the sphere of our knowledge on the foundation of observation and experiment in a cumulative manner (1994: 5). This approach is in contrast
to making more general statements (theories) and
then deducing from them expectations of what
can be found in certain communities. Labov
instead works towards finding an explanation
based on internal factors of linguistic change, an
explanation which must ultimately ... find its
causes in a domain outside of linguistics: in
physiology, acoustic phonetics, social relations,
perceptual or cognitive capacities (1994: 5). It is
towards this end of explanation that Labov has
guided his work for over four decades.
NOTES
1 As with any historical view of an ongoing academic endeavor (Hazen, 2007a, 2007b), this chapter
is one scholars perspective. It should therefore be
read as an interpretation and, accordingly, part of a
larger conversation about how the fields analyzing
language in society have developed.
2 Labov cites for the precise statement concerning idiolects Zellig Harriss (1951: 9) Methods
in Structural Linguistics: These investigations are
carried out for the speech of one particular person,
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contest the assumptions of categoricity and the resulting methodological choices (see Chambers, 2003).
12 The American Language Survey was the basis
for Labov (1966a).
13 Weinreich et al. (1968: 167) write: To
account for such intimate variation, it is necessary to
introduce another concept into the mode of orderly
heterogeneity which we are developing here: the
linguistic variable a variable element within the
system controlled by a single rule. The term variable
rule does come up in footnote 56 on page 170, but
it is presented without comment.
14 Although, in section 3.21 on Coexistent
Systems, Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968: 159)
discuss forms from different language systems (in
one speaker):
In terms of the model of a differentiated language system that we are developing, such
forms share the following properties: (1) They
offer alternative means of saying the same
thing: that is, for each utterance in A there is a
corresponding utterance in B which provides
the same referential information (is synonymous) and cannot be differentiated except in
terms of the over-all significance which marks
the use of B as against A.
15 Labovs (1972d) paper had first been presented in 1968 at the LSA winter meeting.
16 Labov and Fanshel (1977) take up a different
track of narrative analysis by analysing a psychologists doctorpatient relations.
17 Reviewed by Kretzschmar (1996).
18 Reviewed by Kretzschmar (2005).
19 Volume III is in progress at the time of
writing. The draft chapters are available at: http://
www.ling.upenn.edu/phonoatlas/PLC3/PLC3.html.
20 This book is reviewed in Bailey (2007). Some
critics view this work as a return to traditional dialectology, with a lack of representative sampling in any
one area.
21 See Thomas (2001) for a discussion of Labovs
influence.
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