William Labov

The intersection of sex and social class in the course of linguistic change

Two general principles of sexual differentiation emerge from previous sociolinguistic studies: that men use a higher frequency of nonstandard forms than women in stable situations, and that women are generally the innovators in linguistic change. It is not clear whether these two tendencies can be unified, or how differences between the sexes can account for the observed patterns of linguistic change. The extensive interaction between sex and other social factors raises the issue as to whether the curvilinear social class pattern associated with linguistic change is the product of a rejection of female-dominated changes by lower-class males. Multivariate analysis of data from the Philadelphia Project on Linguistic Change and Variation indicates that sexual differentiation is independent of social class at the beginning of a change, but that interaction develops gradually as social awareness of the change increases. It is proposed that sexual differentiation of language is generated by two distinct processes: (1) for all social classes, the asymmetric context of language learning leads to an initial acceleration of female-dominated changes and retardation of male-dominated changes; (2) women lead men in the rejection of linguistic changes as they are recognized by the speech community, a differentiation that is maximal for the second highest status group.

THE LOGIC OF NONSTANDARD ENGLISH

In the past decade, a great deal of federally sponsored research has been devoted to the educational problems of children in ghetto schools. In order to account for the poor performance of children in these schools, educational psychologists have attempted to discover what kind of disadvantage or defect they are suffering from. The viewpoint that has been widely accepted and used as the basis for large scale intervention programs is that the children show a cultural deficit as a result of an impoverished environment in their early years. Considerable attention has been given to language. In this area the deficit theory appears as the concept of verbal deprivation. Negro children from the ghetto area are said to receive little verbal stimulation, to hear very little well-formed language, and as a result are impoverished in their means of verbal expression. They cannot speak complete sentences, do not know the names of common objects, cannot form concepts or convey logical thoughts.

The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change

The Atlas of North American English provides the first overall view of the pronunciation and vowel systems of the dialects of the U.S. and Canada. The Atlas re-defines the regional dialects of American English on the basis of sound changes active in the 1990s and draws new boundaries reflecting those changes. It is based on a telephone survey of 762 local speakers, representing all the urbanized areas of North America. It has been developed by Bill Labov, one of the leading sociolinguists of the world, together with his colleagues Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg. The Atlas consists of a printed volume accompanied by an interactive CD-ROM. The print and multimedia content is alsoavailable online. Combined Edition: Book and Multimedia CD-ROM The printed volume contains 23 chapters that re-define the geographic boundaries of North American dialects and trace the influence of gender, age, education, and city size on the progress of sound change; findings that show a dramatic and increasing divergence of English in North America; 139 four color maps that illustrate the regional distribution of phonological and phonetic variables across the North American continent; 120 four color vowel charts of individual speakers. The interactive multimedia CD-ROM supplements the printed articles and maps by providing a data base with measurements of more than 100,000 vowels and mean values for 439 speakers; the Plotnik program for mapping each of the individual vowel systems; extended sound samples of all North American dialects; interactive applications to enhance classroom presentations. Online only Version: Print and Multimedia Content The online only version offers simultaneous access to the print and multimedia content to all users in the university/library network; presents a wider selection of interactive data, maps, and audio samples that will be recurrently updated; provides students with concurrent access to research material for classroom assignments. Key Features: a multimedia reference tool, overthrows previously heldhypothesesin North American dialectology, sound samples on CD-ROM easily accessible through clearly designedinteractive maps. System Requirements for CD-ROM and Online only version: Windows PC: Pentium PC, Windows 9x, NT, or XP, at least 16MB RAM, CD-ROM Drive, 16 Bit Soundcard, SVGA (600 x 800 resolution). Apple MAC: OS 6 or higher, 16 Bit Soundcard, at least 16MB RAM. Supported Browsers: Internet Explorer, 5.5 or 6 (Mac OS: Internet Explorer 5.1)/Netscape 7.x or higher/Mozilla 1.0 or higher/Mozilla Firefox 1.0 or higher. PlugIns: Macromedia Flash Player 6/Acrobat Reader.

Some Principles of Linguistic Methodology.

Current difficulties in achieving intersubjective agreement in linguistics require attention to principles of methodology which consider sources of error and ways to eliminate them. The methodological assumptions and practices of various branches of linguistics are considered from the standpoint of the types of data gathered: texts, elicitations, intuitions and observations. Observations of the vernacular provide the most systematic basis for linguistic theory, but have been the most difficult kinds of data for linguists to obtain; techniques for solving the problems encountered are outlined. Intersubjective agreement is best reached by convergence of several kinds of data with complementary sources of error.

Constraints on the agentless passive

This paper is a quantitative study of the factors that determine the selection of passive constructions over active ones by English speakers. By examining a large body of passives used in spontaneous speech, together with the sentences that show an opposing choice, we are able to throw light on the crucial question of which syntactic and which semantic features of the environment act to constrain the choice and whether syntactic or semantic factors predominate in this case. In the course of the analysis, we will also have something to say about the social factors that have been reported to determine the use of the passive.

Transmission and Diffusion

The transmission of linguistic change within a speech community is characterized by incrementation within a faithfully reproduced pattern characteristic of the family tree model, while diffusion across communities shows weakening of the original pattern and a loss of structural features. It is proposed that this is the result of the difference between the learning abilities of children and adults. Evidence is drawn from two studies of geographic diffusion. (i) Structural constraints are lost in the diffusion of the New York City pattern of tensing short-a to four other communities: northern New Jersey, Albany, Cincinnati, and New Orleans. (ii) The spread of the Northern Cities Shift from Chicago to St. Louis is found to represent the borrowing of individual sound changes, rather than the diffusion of the structural pattern as a whole.

Rules for Ritual Insults

A great variety of terms describe this activity:1the dozens, sounding and signifying are three of the most common. The activity itself is remarkably similar throughout the various black communities, both in the form and content of the insults themselves and in the rules of verbal interaction which operate. In this section we will refer to the institution by the most common term in Harlem — sounding.

RESOLVING THE NEOGRAMMARIAN CONTROVERSY

Recent investigations of the history of Chinese have given new support to the view that sound change diffuses gradually across the lexicon. Yet instrumental studies of sound change in progress support the Neogrammarian position that change affects all words that include the sound according to their phonetic environment. The paradox can be resolved by distinguishing abstract phonological change from change in low-level output rules. Both types of rules can be observed in recent studies of sound change in progress in Philadelphia: the lexical split of short a shows lexical diffusion in progress, while raising, lowering, fronting, and backing rules show Neogrammarian regularity. A review of the literature on completed changes and other changes in progress tends to support the relevance of a hierarchy of abstractness in determining the nature of the transition from one stage to the other.*

Objectivity and commitment in linguistic science: The case of the Black English trial in Ann Arbor

Though many linguists have shown a strong concern for social issues, there is an apparent contradiction between the principles of objectivity needed for scientific work and commitment to social action. The Black English trial in Ann Arbor showed one way in which this contradiction could be resolved. The first decade of research on Black English was marked by violent differences between creolists and dialectologists on the structure and origin of the dialect. The possibility of a joint point of view first appeared in the general reaction of linguists against the view that blacks were linguistically and genetically inferior. The entrance of black linguists into the field was a critical factor in the further development of the creole hypothesis and the recognition of the distinctive features of the tense and aspect system. At the trial, linguists were able to present effective testimony in the form of a unified view on the origins and structural characteristics of the Black English Vernacular and argue for its validity as an alternate to standard English. (Black English, language and the law.)

Near-mergers and the suspension of phonemic contrast

In 1972, Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner reported a series of “near-mergers” that have since proved to be difficult to assimilate to the standard conception of the phoneme and that challenged our current understanding of how language production is related to perception and learning (Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner, 1972). In these situations, speakers consistently reported that two classes of sounds were “the same,” yet consistently differentiated them in production. Labov (1975a) suggested that this phenomenon was the explanation for two “falsely reported mergers” in the history of English, where word classes were said to have merged and afterward separated. It appears that sound change may bring two phonemes into such close approximation that semantic contrast between them is suspended for native speakers of the dialect, without necessarily leading to merger. This article reports on further observations of near-mergers, which confirm their implications for both synchronic and diachronic issues, and presents the results of experiments that show how phonemic contrast is suspended for an entire community.