WILLIAM LABOV
Professor of Linguistics University of Pennsylvania

Curriculum Vitae
Bibliography

The Cognitive Capacities of the Sociolinguistic Monitor. The PowerPoint presentation of a plenary address given at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 17 in Amsterdam on March 5, 2008. The paper summarizes the findings of a number of experiments designed to determine listeners' sensitivity to freqiency, using the variables (ING) and (R) in three regions: Philadelphia, South Carolina and Boston/New Hampshire. Adult judges respond to a range of frequencies of a marked variant with a logarithmic function in which the impact of any given deviation from the norm is the proportional increase to the sum of deviations.. A surprising age effect appears, where all subjects over 23 show this function, but those younger are split into two different modal types: those who reproduce the function and those who do not..

The Life History of Language Change. The PowerPoint presentation of a plenary address given at the International Congress of Historical Linguistics at Montreal on August 6, 2007. The paper develops a general characterization of sequences of linguistic changes: triggering events, governing principles, forks in the road and driving forces. The major developments in the dialects of North America are linked in a single sequence, where diversity is the product of successions of bidirectional and unidirectional changes,.
Oral narratives of personal experience. An entry to sppear in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, summarizing the approach to narrative analysis that began with Labov and Waletzky 1967, and incorporating some of the more recent methods that are developed in the three papers posted in the Narrative section below.

The Individualized Reading Manual is a tutorial reading program that has been developed at Penn over the last ten years, and has been widely used with struggling readers in elementary schools in various parts of the United States. Some results of the program are described in the section on Reading below. For the first time, all twelve sections of the IRM are made available for downloading as .pdf files from the pages describing the Individualized Reading Program.

New Plotnik 09

 

Plotnik09 is a new version of Plotnik with two major changes from Plotnik08. • There is no longer a quota system for token buttons for each vowel class. Instead, the appropriate symbols needed are created each time a new vowel file is called up. This has immediate consequences for the Save Plot and Recall Plot functions. In Plotnik08, these functions only worked if one preserved the same button quotas: this problem is now done away with, and Recall Plot now returns a complete functioning vowel file where you last left it, for reproduction or conitnued development • Under the View menu, the selection of large screen size is now activated for most laptops as well as Macintosh desk machines. One can view large files in greater detail, Finally, the new Plotnik09.1.1 has the capacity to play individual tokens from a time-stamped Praat file. Download Plotnik09.

Current papers

Language change

Transmission and diffusion. This is the final form of the paper, a .pdf version edited for reading with diagrams in place, as it appeared in print in Language 83:344-387, 2007. The proposals put forward here will be the topic of a conference organized by Ans von Kemanade at Nijmegen on January 17-19, 2008. The paper proposes to integrate the family tree model of language change with the wave model.into a general framework based on changes in language learning ability across the lifespan. The general argument is that the divergence of branches of the family tree is based on the transmission of language structure from adults to children, and the incrementatiaon of changes in progress by children. The diffusion of language contact across branches of the tree is primarily the work of adults who do not preserve structural conditions with the same fidelity, which accounts for the limitations on structural borrowing. The paper studies in detail the diffusion of the NYC short-a system to four other cities, and the diffusion of the Northern Cities Shift to St. Louis along Route I-55.

50 msec with Maciej Baanowski. .2006. Language Variation and Change 18:223-240. A paper initially delivered at NWAVE 33 under the title of "Collision course," concerning an investigation of the overlapping of descending /e/ and fronting /o/ in the course of the Northern Cities Shift. The question is whether or not this overlap in F1/F2 measurements is accompanied by some other feature that disstinguishs them. Duration is the most likely candidate, since /o/ may have acquired phonemic length in its merger with /ah/ in father, spa, etc.  There is only a 50 msec mean difference in the durations of /e/ and /o/ in this area, but experimemtal results show that such a small difference can change category assignment. This is consistent with changes in apparent time, which show a continuing lowering of /e/. especially among women.

Pursuing the cascade model.. A study of the diffusion of linguistic change from the largest city in a region to the progressively next largest cities, using new data from the Atlas of North American English and data on the diffusion of fast food cuisine terms. The diffusion of hoagie from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh is traced with an exact account of the time, place and mechanism. In D. Britain and J. Cheshire (eds). Social Dialectology: In Honor of Peter Trudgill. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Driving forces in linguistic change. In proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Korean Linguistics. This paper deals with triggering events, driving forces and rising levels in linguistic change, and forms part of the synthesis that will be presented in Volume 3 of Principles of Linguistic Change.

The Atlas of North American English

W. Labov, S. Ash and C. Boberg, The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology and sound change. Berlin: Mouton/de Gruyter, 2006. The Atlas is now published and available to libraries and individuals, along with a CD which contains the major functions of the web site. A demonstration copy is available at http://www.mouton-online.com.. If a library has ordered the Atlas, the web site will be available to all those who have access to the library's electronic data-bases, and the complete text of the Atlas can be downloaded in .pdf format. Chapter 11 can be downloaded from the Telsur home page.

Research on reading

11/2/06 Reducing the reading achievement gap for African American children. A PowerPoint presentation to the Fourth Annual Reading First Superintendents Summit Meeting in San Francisco, November 2, 2006.

10/18/06. Variation Theory and the Utility of Linguistics. A PowerPoint presentation to Faire Signe, a colloquium in honor of Pierre Encrevé at Paris. This paper showed how the questions of reading research with African American struggling readers can be answered decisively through the study of variation in speech production and errors in decoding texts.

11/16/06. Spotlight on Reading. This document is designed as an aid to instruction in oral reading. It sums up the results of ten years of research on tutoring in low-income schools by identifying the ten most serious decoding problems that struggling readers encounter. It provides the tutor with the general formulations to use in helping readers understand the general principles of spelling-to-sound relations involved. Asdistributed to a combined meeting of tutors from the West Philadelphia Tutoring Project and America Reads

7/1/06 Unendangered dialects, endangered people. A paper given in March 2006 at the Georgetown Round Table, which focussed on "Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties." It documents the fact that AAVE is not an endangered dialect, but is flourishing and developing as it continues to diverge from other dialects. The paper then shows that the social condition for such divergence is residential segregation, and discusses the social consequences that endanger the lives of speakers of the dialect. The relation of AAVE to reading failure is considered and the relation of reading failure to the cycle of unemployment, crime and family disruption. The paper concludes that if there should be a substantial social shift towards racial integration, AAVe might become an endangered dialect.To appear in the Georgetown Round Table volume for 2006.

9/25/06 Spotlight on reading. A PowerPoint presentation to the Voices of African American Students group of educators in Los Angeles. Shows how research on the language and culture of African American struggling readers can be used to reduce the minority gap in reading achievement.9/22/03.

What is a reading error?  This paper is a recent result of the UMRP research on profiles of reading errors among African American, Euro-American and Latino children throughout the country. It returns to the distinction between differences in pronunciation and mistakes in reading, and shows that it is not possible to decide the status of a given possible error in most cases. A probabilistic solution to the problem is obtaining by studying the semantic shadows cast by possible errors in raising or lowering the frequency  of followiing errors. Results differ for clear errors, pand correct readings, while various types of possible errors tend to behave like one or the other. Striking differences among language/ethnic groups appear which may be linked to varying knowledge of underlying forms. From these results, it is possible to determine which phonological and grammatical patterns most require instruction. .pdf version

The Individualized Reading Program has been developed at the Linguistics Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. It is concerned with raising literacy levels of struggling elementary school readers using the Individualized Reading Manual and the RX Analysis program. The program is now being tested with African American, White and Latino children in West Philadelphia, Atlanta, northern and southern California.

 6/15/98 A Graphic-Phonemic Analysis of the Reading Errors of Inner City Children .W. Labov, B. Baker, L. Ross, M. Brown.
Download the paper in pdf format

Work on narrative

3/12/06. Narrative pre-construction. This short paper appeared in Narrative Inquiry 16.1, a special issue on the state of the art of narrative analysis. It argues that before a narrative can be constructed, it must be pre-constructed by a cognitive process that begins with a decision that a given event is reportable. Pre-construction begins with this most reportable event and proceeds backwards in time to locate events that are linked causally each to the following one, a recursive process that ends with the location of the unreportable event--one that is not reportable in itself and needs no explanation. Comparison of the chain of events with the generated sequence of narrative clauses will give insight into the work a narrator does in transforming and re-organizing events from real time.2/21/02 Ordinary events. A contribution to the proceedings of a conference at Pitzer College, edited by John Fought and Carmen Richardson. It examines a narrative of Ellen Laidlaw recorded by Ron Macaulay in Ayr concerning her father's death, and focuses on the role of very ordinary events in this extraordinary narrative. Download as pdf file.

 9/1/01Uncovering the event structure of narrative.A paper given at the Georgetown Round Table in March of 2001, which examines the possibility of recovering the actual events that underlie a narrative. This is examined first in a story about the first person killed by a car in South Lyons, Michigan, and the confession of a convicted felon in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission records.

Frequency studies

Listeners' sensitivity to frequency. with Sherry Ash, Maya Rabindranath, Tracey Weldon, Maciej Baranowski and Naomi Nagy. This is a first draft of the first of a series of reports on current research on the role of evaluation in linguistic variation and change. A series of experiments were carried out to determine whether listeners could distinguish between various percentages of apical and velar nasals in the suffix -ing to match the typical range of variation found in production. The experiments exposed listeners in Philadelphia, Columbia SC and Durham NH to various trials of a speaker attempting tho qualify as a news broadcaster, where the only differences were the frequencies of /in/ and /ing/. Listeners' responses fit closely an exponential curve, indicating that the sociolinguistic monitor was sensitive to differences as small as 10%, with a social impact equivalent to the proportional increase in deviations from the expected norm..

General

Thinking about Charles Ferguson. Number 163 of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language is an issue edited by Kirk Belnap on "Arabic Sociolinguistics as Viewed by Western Arabists", and dedicated to the memory of Charles Ferguson. The three pages I wrote have nothing to say about Arabic, but they are my best effort to express the profound admiration that I have always had for Fergie. The paper has something to say about wisdom, and other things that were on the tip of my tongue. . .

Some observations on the foundations of linguistics. This is a paper that I wrote in 1987 but never published.  It deals with some general issues concerning the opposition between a mentalist (or idealist) approach to linguistics, and the materialist line taken by historical linguists, dialectologists and sociolinguists.  I would welcome any comments before revising it to fit the current situation..

1/2/02 How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it.. This is a recent revision of the paper I wrote for undergraduates in 1997, to appear shortly in print.

Quantitative analysis

Quantitative reasoning in linguistics. A chapter to appear in Peter Trudgill (ed.), Mouton/De Gruyter Handbook.

---

Other papers

Courses Spring 2008

L563 Sound Change in Progress. Monday 9-11 and Thursday 9-10. Linguistics Lab, 3700 Market St., #300.

L161. The Sociolinguistics of Reading. Monday 3:30-5::30. Linguistics Lab, 3700 Market.