William Labov

William Labov

William Labov was an American social linguistic, this means he looked at social variables which affected language use. He also is a professor at Pennsylvania University. He was interested in the fact of how social class affected language usage.

Martha’s Vineyard

The theory’s Labov looked at was firstly Martha’s Vineyard. It was a popular tourist location which was an island off east coast of America, near New York. In the summer it was mainly tourists there whereas throughout the year it was islanders, Labov wanted to see how that affected language. He named the people that went there on holiday "The summer people" and their status was between middle and upper class. The local population was the "islanders" who were working class. The island had two different parts the “Down- island" and the "Up- island". The down island was where the people live or tourists go, whereas the up island was the location of the fishing men who were working class. The thing about the "fishermen was that they were desired by the islanders because they were valued for the hard work and old fashion ways to help out.

However Labov noticed that the fishermen had their own pronunciation, because they spoke in a non-standard way. Their vowel sounds were more different especially the Diphthongs. Diphthongs are two vowel sounds combined to make their own sound. For example the word "oil" would be an "oy" sound. This comes from a Greek word which means having two sounds.

Findings

Now the founding he found was that young islanders were making a deliberate shift to using the old-style pronunciation. So therefore his ideas were that they have their own identity which differentiates from the summer people. This is a deliberate use of divergence. This makes them distance themselves from the summer people which mean they use their language to represent their identity.

Department store study

Next is the department store study (1996). This was in Manhattan New York. Within this theory Labov was testing the patterns of language usage and their link to prestige and social class. There were three stores that he experimented on which were Sacks 5th avenue, Macys and Klein’s. Sacks were the highest in social class, there was a link between prestige and language. The staff changed their language in order to fit the soundings and standards of the store. Macys is trying to be as prestige as sacks but it’s not quite there. So Labov wanted to test something called the social satisfaction of the post-vocalic r. This was the final r sound in certain words such as beer or guard. In order for him to test this out within stores he used the word fourth. He asked a question designed to receive the answer "fourth floor" or similar (methodology). He then pretended not to hear the response so that they repeat their answer. He did this because the first time someone answers could be spontaneous whereas the second time they get more time to process the correct answer which means they could use their language in a different way.

This means that the r was stratified by class which means that it was spaced out. The high socioeconomic status pronounces the 'r' more frequently than those with lower socioeconomic status. His result were that 62% of people in Sacks pronounced the post-vocalic are, 51% in Macy’s and only 20% in Klein’s. This shows his idea were correct however there were questions that contradicted his findings.

There were problems and concerns towards his theory.  How could Labov possibly know the socioeconomic status of someone just by asking them where the “fourth floor” was? This challenged his theory because certain people say things in different ways it could be from things like their accent or from where they are. This meant that his results could be biased.

Why is he important?

He is an important role for us because he is part of the linguistics department in Pennsylvania University. He has been described as “An enormously original and influential figure that has created much of the methodology” The important thing he discussed was language narrative. Labov with Joshua Waletzky took a social linguistic approach to examine how language works between people. His purpose was to “isolate the elements of narrative”, this piece of work focussed exclusively on oral narratives.  He described it as having two functions, they were referential and evaluative. The referential functions were to align something in place within a story of its contextual world by referencing events in sequential order as they originally occurred. The evaluative function was describing the storytellers’ purpose in telling its story. Then he divided narrative into six sections, these were; abstract which gives an overview of a story. Then there was orientation which serves to orient the listen in respect to the person, place, time and behaviour situation. Next was complication, this was the main story during which the narrative unfolds. Evaluation was after, it was where the author evinces self-awareness, giving explicit or implicit purpose to the retelling of the story. This was followed by resolution, this was something that occurs sequentially, it may give the story a sense of completion. Finally coda, coda was where the listener returns to present drawing them back out of the world of the story into the world of the story telling event. However some narratives do not have a coda so it is not always essential.