William Labov

William Labov (/ləˈboʊv/ lə-BOHV;[1][2]

born December 4, 1927) is an American
linguist, widely regarded as the founder
of the discipline of variationist
sociolinguistics.[3] He has been
described as "an enormously original and
influential figure who has created much
of the methodology" of
sociolinguistics.[4] He is a professor
emeritus in the linguistics department of
the University of Pennsylvania, and
pursues research in sociolinguistics,
language change, and dialectology. He
retired at the end of spring 2014.
 William Labov
Born December 4, 1927
Rutherford, New
Jersey, U.S.

Residence Rittenhouse Square,

Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, U.S.

Occupation Industrial chemist

(1949–60); Associate
professor of
Linguistics (1971–
2014)

Known for Variationist
sociolinguistics

Spouse(s) Gillian Sankoff

(m. 1993)

Academic background

Education Harvard College, B.A.

 (1948)
Columbia University,
M.A. (1963), Ph.D.
(1964)
Doctoral advisor Uriel Weinreich

Academic work

Discipline Linguist

Institutions University of
Pennsylvania

Notes

Labov's Curriculum vitae

Biography
Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he
studied at Harvard (1948) and worked as
an industrial chemist (1949–61) before
turning to linguistics. For his MA thesis
(1963) he completed a study of change
in the dialect of Martha's Vineyard, which
was presented before the Linguistic
Society of America. Labov took his PhD
(1964) at Columbia University studying
under Uriel Weinreich. He taught at
Columbia (1964–70) before becoming a
professor of linguistics at the University
of Pennsylvania (1971), and then became
director of the university's Linguistics
Laboratory (1977).

He has been married to fellow

sociolinguist Gillian Sankoff since
1993.[5] Prior to his marriage to Sankoff,
he was married to sociologist Teresa
Gnasso Labov.
Work
This biography of a living person needs
additional citations for verification.
Learn more

The methods he used to collect data for

his study of the varieties of English
spoken in New York City, published as
The Social Stratification of English in
New York City (1966), have been
influential in social dialectology. In the
late 1960s and early 1970s, his studies
of the linguistic features of African
American Vernacular English (AAVE)
were also influential: he argued that
AAVE should not be stigmatized as
substandard, but respected as a variety
of English with its own grammatical
rules.[6] He has also pursued research in
referential indeterminacy, and he is noted
for his seminal studies of the way
ordinary people structure narrative
stories of their own lives. In addition,
several of his classes are service-based
with students going out into the West
Philadelphia region to help tutor young
children while simultaneously learning
linguistics from different dialects such as
AAVE.

More recently he has studied changes in

the phonology of English as spoken in
the United States today, and studied the
origins and patterns of chain shifts of
vowels (one sound replacing a second,
replacing a third, in a complete chain). In
the Atlas of North American English
(2006), he and his co-authors find three
major divergent chain shifts taking place
today: a Southern Shift (in Appalachia
and southern coastal regions), a
Northern Cities Vowel Shift affecting a
region from Madison, Wisconsin, east to
Utica, New York, and a Canadian Shift
affecting most of Canada, as well as
some areas in the Western and
Midwestern (Midland) United States, in
addition to several minor chain shifts in
smaller regions.

Among Labov's well-known students are

Anne H. Charity Hudley, Penelope Eckert,
Gregory Guy, Geoffrey Nunberg, Shana
Poplack, and John Rickford. His methods
were adopted in England by Peter Trudgill
for Norwich speech and K. M. Petyt for
West Yorkshire speech.

Labov's works include The Study of

Nonstandard English (1969), Language in
the Inner City: Studies in Black English
Vernacular (1972), Sociolinguistic
Patterns (1972), Principles of Linguistic
Change (vol.I Internal Factors, 1994; vol.II
Social Factors, 2001, vol.III Cognitive and
Cultural factors, 2010), and, together with
Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg, The
Atlas of North American English (2006).
Labov was awarded the 2013 Benjamin
Franklin Medal in Computer and
Cognitive Science by the Franklin
Institute with the citation "[f]or
establishing the cognitive basis of
language variation and change through
rigorous analysis of linguistic data, and
for the study of non-standard dialects
with significant social and cultural
implications."[2][7]

Language in use

In "Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of

Personal Experience",[8] Labov, with
Joshua Waletzky, takes a sociolinguistic
approach to examining how language
orally-generated texts obtained via
observed group interaction and interview
(600 interviews were taken from several
studies whose participants included
ethnically diverse groups of children and
adults from various backgrounds[12]),
Labov divides narrative into five or six
sections:

Abstract – gives an overview of the

story.
Orientation – Labov describes this as
"referential [free clauses which] serve
to orient the listener in respect to
person, place, time, and behavioral
situation".[10] He specifies that these
are contextual clues which precede the
main story.
Complication – the main story, during
which the narrative unfolds. A story
may consist of multiple complication
sections.
Evaluation – author evinces self-
awareness, giving explicit or implicit
purpose to the retelling of the story.
Thus evaluation gives some indication
of the significance the author
attributes to his/her story. But
evaluation can be done subtly: for
instance, "lexical intensifiers [are a
type of] semantically defined
evaluation".[13]
 Resolution – occurs sequentially
following the evaluation. The
resolution may give the story a sense
of completion.
Coda – returns listener to the present,
drawing them back out of the world of
the story into the world of the
storytelling event. A coda is not
essential to a narrative, and some
narratives do not have a coda.

While not every narrative includes all of

these elements, the purpose of this
subdivision is to show that narratives
have inherent structural order. Labov
argues that narrative units must retell
events in the order that they were
experienced because narrative is
temporally sequenced. In other words,
events do not occur at random, but are
connected to one another; thus "the
original semantic interpretation" depends
on their original order.[14] To demonstrate
this sequence, he breaks a story down
into its basic parts. He defines narrative
clause as the "basic unit of narrative"[15]
around which everything else is built.
Clauses can be distinguished from one
another by temporal junctures,[16] which
indicate a shift in time and which
separate narrative clauses. Temporal
junctures mark temporal sequencing
because clauses cannot be rearranged
without disrupting their meaning.
Labov and Waletzky's findings are
important because they derived them
from actual data rather than abstract
theorization (a descriptive rather than a
prescriptive approach). Labov, Waletzky,
&c., set up interview situations and
documented speech patterns in
storytelling, keeping with the
ethnographic tradition of tape recording
oral text so it can be referenced exactly.
This inductive method creates a new
system through which to understand
story text.

Golden Age Principle

One of Labov's most quoted
contributions to theories of language
change is his Golden Age Principle (or
Golden Age Theory). It claims that any
changes in the sounds or the grammar
that have come to conscious awareness
in a speech community trigger a
uniformly negative reaction.

Communities differ in the

extent to which they stigmatize
the newer forms of language,
but I have never yet met
anyone who greeted them with
applause. Some older citizens
welcome the new music and
dances, the new electronic
devices and computers. But no
one has ever been heard to say,
"It's wonderful the way young
people talk today. It's so much
better than the way we talked
when I was a kid." ... The most
general and most deeply held
belief about language is the
Golden Age Principle: At some
time in the past, language was
in a state of perfection. It is
understood that in such a
state, every sound was correct
and beautiful, and every word
and expression was proper,
accurate, and appropriate.
Furthermore, the decline from
that state has been regular and
persistent, so that every
change represents a falling
away from the golden age,
rather than a return to it.
Every new sound will be heard
as ugly, and every new
expression will be heard as
improper, inaccurate, and
inappropriate. Given this
principle it is obvious that
language change must be
 interpreted as nonconformity
to established norms, and that
people will reject changes in
the structure of language when
they become aware of them.

— William Labov,
Principles of Linguistic
Change, Vol. 2: Social
Factors (2001), p. 514

Scholarly influence and

criticism

Labov's seminal work has been

referenced and critically examined by a
number of scholars, mainly for its
structural rigidity. Kristin Langellier
explains that "the purpose of Labovian
analysis is to relate the formal properties
of the narrative to their functions":[17]
clause-level analysis of how text affects
transmission of message. This model
has several flaws, which Langellier points
out: it examines textual structure to the
exclusion of context and audience, which
often act to shape a text in real-time; it's
relevant to a specific demographic (may
be difficult to extrapolate); and, by
categorizing the text at a clausal level, it
burdens analysis with theoretical
distinctions that may not be illuminating
in practice.[18] Anna De Fina remarks that
[within Labov's model] "the defining
property of narrative is temporal
sequence, since the order in which the
events are presented in the narrative is
expected to match the original events as
they occurred...",[19] which differs from
more contemporary notions of
storytelling, in which a naturally time-
conscious flow would include jumping
forward and back through time as
mandated by, for example, anxieties felt
concerning futures and their interplay
with subsequent decisions. De Fina and
Langellier both note that, though
wonderfully descriptive, Labov's model is
nevertheless difficult to code, thus
potentially limited in
application/practice.[20] De Fina also
agrees with Langellier that Labov's model
ignores the complex and often quite
relevant subject of intertextuality in
narrative.[21] To an extent, Labov evinces
awareness of these concerns, saying "it
is clear that these conclusions are
restricted to the speech communities
that we have examined",[11] and "the
overall structure of the narratives we've
examined is not uniform".[22] In
"Rethinking Ventriloquism," Diane
Goldstein uses Labovian notions of
tellability—internal coherence in narrative
—to inform her concept of untellability.[23]

Honours
In 1985 Labov received an honorary
doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities
at Uppsala University, Sweden.[24]

In 2013 Labov received a Franklin

Institute Award in Computer and
Cognitive Science for "establishing the
cognitive basis of language variation and
change through rigorous analysis of
linguistic data, and for the study of non-
standard dialects with significant social
and cultural implications." [25]

In 2015 he was awarded the Neil and

Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics by the
British Academy "for his significant
contribution to linguistics and the
language sciences".[26]
References
1. Gordon, Matthew J. (2006). "Interview
with William Labov". Journal of English
Linguistics. 34 (4): 332–51.
doi:10.1177/0075424206294308 .
2. Tom Avril (October 22, 2012). "Penn
linguist Labov wins Franklin Institute
award" . The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Retrieved October 23, 2012.
3. E.g., in the opening chapter of The
Handbook of Language Variation and
Change (ed. Chambers et al., Blackwell
2002), J.K. Chambers writes that
"variationist sociolinguistics had its
effective beginnings only in 1963, the
year in which William Labov presented
the first sociolinguistic research report";
the dedication page of the Handbook
says that Labov's "ideas imbue every
page".
4. Trask, R.L. (1997). A Student's
Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.
London: Arnold. p. 124. ISBN 0-340-
65266-7.
5. Meyerhoff, Miriam; Nagy, Naomi, eds.
(2008). Social Lives in Language. John
Benjamins. p. 21. ISBN 90-272-1863-3.
6. Labov, William (June 1972). "Academic
Ignorance and Black Intelligence" . The
Atlantic. Retrieved March 28, 2015.
7. "Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer
and Cognitive Science" . Franklin
Institute. Retrieved September 9, 2014.
8. Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997).
"Narrative analysis: Oral versions of
personal experience."
9. Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997).
"Narrative analysis: Oral versions of
personal experience." p. 12.
10. Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997).
"Narrative analysis: Oral versions of
personal experience." p. 32.
11. Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997).
"Narrative analysis: Oral versions of
personal experience." p. 41.
12. Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997).
"Narrative analysis: Oral versions of
personal experience." p. 13.
13. Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997).
"Narrative analysis: Oral versions of
personal experience." p. 37.
14. Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997).
"Narrative analysis: Oral versions of
personal experience." p. 21.
15. Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997).
"Narrative analysis: Oral versions of
personal experience." p. 22.
16. Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997).
"Narrative analysis: Oral versions of
personal experience." p. 25.
17. Langellier, Kristin M. "Personal
narratives: Perspectives on theory and
research." Text and Performance
Quarterly 9.4 (1989): 243-276. p. 245.
18. Langellier, Kristin M. "Personal
narratives: Perspectives on theory and
research." Text and Performance
Quarterly 9.4 (1989): 243-276. p. 246-8.
19. De Fina, Anna, and Alexandra
Georgakopoulou. Analyzing narrative:
Discourse and sociolinguistic
perspectives. Cambridge University
Press, 2011. p. 27.
20. De Fina, Anna, and Alexandra
Georgakopoulou. Analyzing narrative:
Discourse and sociolinguistic
perspectives. Cambridge University
Press, 2011. p. 32.
21. De Fina, Anna, and Alexandra
Georgakopoulou. Analyzing narrative:
Discourse and sociolinguistic
perspectives. Cambridge University
Press, 2011. p. 35.
22. Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1997).
"Narrative analysis: Oral versions of
personal experience." p. 40.
23. Goldstein, Diane E. "Rethinking
Ventriloquism: Untellability, Chaotic
Narratives, Social Justice, and the Choice
to Speak For, About, and Without."
Journal of Folklore Research 49.2 (2012):
179-198.
24. "Honorary doctorates - Uppsala
University, Sweden" . www.uu.se.
25. "Franklin Institute Awards: William
Labov" . Franklin Institute.
26. "William Labov receives the Neil and
Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics from
the British Academy" . Department of
Linguistics. University of Pennsylvania.
Retrieved July 30, 2017.

External links
Listen to this article (info/dl)

This audio file was created from a revision of the article "William Labov" dated 2006-02-04, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. (Audio
help)

More spoken articles

William Labov's home page
Journal of English Linguistics interview
NPR story "American Accent
Undergoing Great Vowel Shift"
 Sociolinguistics: an interview with
William Labov ReVEL, vol. 5, n. 9,
2007.

Retrieved from
"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=William_Labov&oldid=879847678"

Last edited 22 hours ago by Jesse…

Content is available under CC BY-SA 3.0 unless

otherwise noted.