Variationist theory william labov biography summary

Labov was a professor in the linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and pursued research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology. He retired in but continued to publish research until his death in According to Labov, at his birth the physician who delivered him was William Carlos Williams.

He attended Harvard University, where he majored in English and philosophy and studied chemistry. He graduated from Harvard in In the late s and early s, 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 rather respected as a variety of English with its own grammatical rules.

He has also pursued research in referential indeterminacy and is noted for his studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives.

Sociolinguistics theory

Several of his classes are service-based, with students going to West Philadelphia to help tutor young children while simultaneously learning linguistics from different dialects such as AAVE. More recently, William Labov has studied ongoing changes in the phonology of English as spoken in the United States, as well as 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 , he and his co-authors find three major divergent chain shifts taking place today:. Petyt for West Yorkshire speech. I Internal Factors, ; vol. II Social Factors, , vol. This is significant because it contextualizes the study of structure and form, connecting purpose to method. William 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,.

Formally analyzing data from orally generated texts obtained via observed group interaction and interview interviews were taken from several studies whose participants included ethnically diverse groups of children and adults from various backgrounds , William Labov divides narrative into five or six sections:. Abstract — gives an overview of the story.