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Professor William Labov was born in Rutherford, New Jersey,in 1927. He pursued undergraduate studies at Harvard College,graduating in 1948 with a B.A. in English and Philosophy. He worked as an industrial chemist in the following eleven years, and returned to academic life in 1961, receiving an M.A. in Linguistics from Columbia University in 1963 and Ph.D. in 1964. He taught in the Linguistics Department at Columbia until 1970, when he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been John and Margaret Fassitt Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Linguistics Laboratory.
Professor Labov laid the foundations of the quantitative study of language change and variation in his early sociolinguistic research(Labov 1963, 1966, 1970, 1972c, 1972e). His Master’s essay was a study of the social motivation of vowel centralization on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. His doctoral dissertation analyzed the social stratification of English in New York City, based on detailed observations of phonological features such as post-vocalic r in New Yorkers’ speech. Professor Labov advanced the concept of “patterned heterogeneity”, arguing that while the speech of individuals may seem chaotic and unpredictable, regularity can in fact be found in the patterns of language use when viewed against speech styles, age or socio-economic status. The Labovian model of patterned variation has been confirmed in numerous studies of sociolinguistic variation in urban communities in various parts of the world. It has also received support from studies of grammatical variation, with respect, for example, to features of contraction and deletion in varieties of English(Labov 1969b, 1972e).
Together with his teacher Uriel Weinreich, Professor Labov gave new impetus to historical linguistics by proposing a theoretical framework whereby ongoing language can be studied empirically through the study of language variation (Labov 1965; Labov,Weinreich and Herzog 1968). The framework identifies basic questions that must be addressed by any theory of language change: constraints(possible conditions for change), transition (how change move from one stage to another), embedding (how change is embedded in the linguistic and social structures), evaluation (how change is subjectively perceived by speakers), and actuation. With this strategy of using the present to explain the past (Labov 1975b), Professor Labov has been able to locate the typical source of sound change in the middle strata of the community (Lower Middle Class or Upper Working Class)(Labov 1980), based on large scale studies of Philadelphia English in the 1970s. His sociolinguistic findings also allow him to critically examine the Neogrammarian hypothesis and define the domains of regular sound change and lexical diffusion (Labov 1981).
Professor Labov’s contributions to historical linguistics are summed up in three volumes of Principles of Linguistic Change (I: Internal factors, 1994; II: Social factors, 2001; III: Cognitive and cultural factors, 2010). In 2006, he published the Atlas of North American English (with co-authors S. Ash & C. Boberg),which showed increasing diversity in regional dialects across the continent. In several of his papers (Labov 1989a, 2007), he explores the connection between language change and language acquisition,observing that child language may mirror the historically preserved patterns of variation, and proposing that different learning modes of children and adults led to the family tree and wave models of linguistic evolution.
Seeing variation as central to language, Professor Labov has articulated his ideas on methodological issues such as the Observer’s paradox (“the aim of linguistic research in the community must be to find out how people talk when they are not being systematically observed; yet we can only obtain this data by systematic observation”),the status of intuitions, variable rules, and formal methods (Labov 1971, 1972f, 1977, 1996). He has also invented innovative techniques,now widely known, for eliciting spontaneous speech from speakers,whose attention to their own speech is controlled as a factor related to the level of formality. In collaboration with David Sankoff, he has implemented the mathematics of variable rules in a software for relevant statistical computations (Labov & Sankoff 1978).
Professor Labov has contributed to several other areas of language study. In research on the vernacular of everyday life, he was one of the earliest scholars to delineate the structure of narratives,identifying such functional elements as orientation, complication,evaluation, resolution and coda (Labov & Waletzky 1967), and to analyze rules governing discourse (Labov & Fanshel 1977). His analysis of oral narratives of everyday life has been widely used in the expanding field of narrative studies. His 1973 paper “The boundaries of words and their meanings” remains one of the most vivid demonstrations of the prototype structure of semantic categories. He has also worked on semantic topics related to interrogatives (Labov &T. Labov 1976) and universal quantifiers (1986).
Throughout his career, Professor Labov has been engaged in the application of linguistic knowledge to educational issues, for example,in demonstrating that African-American Vernacular English [AAVE]is a system well-developed for learning and reason, and clarifying its relation to literacy (Labov 1969b, 1972e, 1983, 1994, 1995, 1998).He is a senior author of Houghton-Mifflin’s Portals to Reading , an intervention program to raise reading achievement in grades 4-8.
Professor Labov is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1979, and held Guggenheim fellowships in 1970 and 1987. He is co-editor of Language Variation and Change. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Uppsala (1985), Liège(1990), York (1998), Edinburgh (2005), and Paris X (2007).
(Homepage: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~labov/)