William Labov

Born

December 4, 1927 (age 88)

Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S.

Residence

Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.

Education

Harvard College, B.A. (1948)

Columbia University, M.A. (1963), Ph.D. (1964)

Occupation Industrial chemist (194960), Associate professor (1971present)
Employer

University of Pennsylvania

Known for

Variationist sociolinguistics

Spouse(s)

Gillian Sankoff (m. 1993)

Notes
Labov's Curriculum vitae
William "Bill"[1] Labov (/lbov/ l-bohv;[2][3] born December 4, 1927) is an
American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist
sociolinguistics.[4] He has been described as "an enormously original and influential
figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics.[5] He is
employed as a professor in the linguistics department of the University of
Pennsylvania, and pursues research in sociolinguistics, language change, and
dialectology. He semi-retired at the end of spring 2014.

Biography

Edit

Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he studied at Harvard (1948) and worked as an

industrial chemist (194961) 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).
In 1985 Labov received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities at
Uppsala University, Sweden.[6]

He has been married to fellow sociolinguist Gillian Sankoff since 1993.[7] Prior to his
marriage to Sankoff, he was married to sociologist Teresa Gnasso Labov.

Work Edit

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.
[8] 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."[3][9]

Language in use

Edit

In "Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience",[10] Labov, with Joshua

Waletzky, takes a sociolinguistic approach to examining how language works
between people. This is significant because it contextualizes the study of structure
and form, connecting purpose to method. His stated purpose is to "isolate the
elements of narrative".[11] This work focuses exclusively on oral narratives.

Labov describes narrative as having two functions: referential and evaluative, with
its referential functions orienting and grounding a story in its contextual world by
referencing events in sequential order as they originally occurred,[12] and its
evaluative functions describing the storytellers purpose in telling the story.[13]
Formally analyzing data from 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[14]), 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".[12] 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".[15]
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.[16] To demonstrate this sequence,
he breaks a story down into its basic parts. He defines narrative clause as the "basic
unit of narrative"[17] around which everything else is built. Clauses can be
distinguished from one another by temporal junctures,[18] 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 Waletzkys 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.

Scholarly influence and criticism Edit

Labovs 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":[19] 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; its 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.[20] Anna De
Fina remarks that [within Labovs 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",[21] which
differs from more contemporary notions of storytelling, in which a naturally timeconscious 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, Labovs model is nevertheless difficult to code, thus potentially limited

in application/practice.[22] De Fina also agrees with Langellier that Labovs model
ignores the complex and often quite relevant subject of intertextuality in narrative.
[23] 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",[13] and "the overall structure of the narratives weve examined is not
uniform".[24] In "Rethinking Ventriloquism," Diane Goldstein uses Labovian notions
of tellabilityinternal coherence in narrativeto inform her concept of untellability.
[25]