William Labov Research Articles

Treasure Tales and Pedagogical Discourse in Mexicano New Mexico

MORE THAN A DECADE has elapsed since Hymes's statement appeared in this journal. The article chides linguists as well as anthropologists and other social scientists for overlooking the complexity of folkloric forms and the potential they hold for resolving theoretical dilemmas. Hymes was particularly concerned with a complementary shortsightedness on the part of the two camps with respect to the nature of language use: In short, linguists have abstracted from the content of speech, social scientists from its form, and both from the patterning of its (Hymes 1972:43). Hymes noted in conclusion that folklore can make a special contribution to linguistics and the social sciences, since verbal art performances provide data on crucial yet neglected aspects of language use. It is, he argued, precisely in these sorts of expressive events that the rapprochement between form and content, language and culture becomes apparent. Statements by Joshua Fishman, John Gumperz, Dell Hymes, William Labov, and others regarding the importance of conducting research on language use have borne fruit over the years. The field of linguistics has changed substantially. Practitioners, including Noam Chomsky himself, have become more concerned with meaning. Most departments of linguistics now include sociolinguistics, and several major journals have arisen in this area. Similarly, anthropologists have turned increasingly away from functionalism; this movement was furthered by Claude Levi-Strauss's research on the structure of myth (1963[1955], 1964). Although structuralism itself subsequently lost ground to less formal and reductionistic approaches, interest in verbal art has nonetheless increased. Ethnographers are devoting increasing amounts of time to the study of speech acts and sociolinguistic repertoires. Folklorists, linguists, and anthropologists such as Roger Abrahams, Richard Bauman, Alan Dundes, Henry Glassie, Kenneth Goldstein, Gary Gossen, Barbara Kirshen-

Cooper, Labov, Larry and Charles

David Cooper's ‘Labov, Larry and Charles’ performed a valuable service in showing how William Labov in ‘The logic of non‐standard English’ failed to provide a fair interpretation of the speech of Larry, a 15‐year‐old black ghetto boy and that of Charles, an educated middle‐class black. Labov's attempts to provide an unsympathetic interpretation of Charles were effectively exposed by Cooper. However, by relying on Labov's own deficient account of the logical form of Larry's arguments, he succeeds in giving an unnecessarily harsh presentation of Larry's acumen as a reasoner. An alternative approach, based on a methodological principle of treating speakers as coherent and reasonable unless there is decisive evidence to the contrary, would recognise Charles's reasonableness but would also recognise the unintentional deficiencies in Labov's treatment of Larry which make the latter seem less than reasonable. Labov's article can be seen as valuable in retrospect (a) because it provided damaging counter evidence ...

Three Models of Narrative Comprehension in William Stafford's “Traveling through the Dark”: Some Relations between Schemata and Interpretive Context (Part 2)

This article discusses the mechanisms involved in accounting for William Stafford's poem “Traveling Through the Dark.” Part 1 presented the narrative models of Teun van Dijk and William Labov, while Part 2 continues the discussion of Labov's model, introduces Stanley Fish's view of narrative, and relates all three models to Roger Schank's and Robert de Beaugrande's theoretical work on stories. In the conclusion, a number of criteria for the evaluation of narrative theories are suggested.

Labov, Larry and Charles

The linguistic debate to have had the most marked impact upon educational discussion has undoubtedly been the one over 'linguistic deficit (or deprivation)'. The impact has been of both a theoretical and practical kind. If some children speak a language that is 'deficient', this must surely go some way towards explaining why those children have 'underachieved' in school. And, if so, then 'linguistic deficit' must prima facie, be something that teachers, as a matter of conscious policy, must try to eradicate if underachievement is to be ended. The thesis of 'linguistic deprivation' is indelibly associated with the name of Basil Bernstein, who argued in a series of articles that working-class and middle-class children speak according to two different codes-a 'restricted' and 'elaborated' one respectively; and that the former code, for a number of reasons, places its users under a disadvantage in the school system [1]. Bernstein frequently inserted passages disclaiming any value-judgements on the two codes, and insisting that we should not speak of one as 'superior' or 'inferior' to the other. But such disclaimers did little to weaken the apparent thrust of his writings. For one thing, middle-class speakers, in his own view, can employ both codes; so that there is no way of talking of which they are deprived in the way that working-class speakers, confined to the 'restricted' code, are. Second, Bernstein's descriptions of some of the features of the 'restricted' code make it difficult to see how these features could avoid negative judgement. A crucial feature, for example, is the way its speakers are tied, in what they say, to the actual context in which discussion is proceeding; something that is surely a disadvantage when, as we often do, we want to talk about things not present in context. At any rate, the reaction to Bernstein's work-and to similar ideas mooted in the USA and Germany-was that teachers and educational administrators should actively intervene in altering and improving the speech of working-class, or black, or dialect speakers, so that they would be better able to exploit their educational opportunities. The reaction to this thesis, when it came, was strong and impassioned. The name indelibly associated with this reaction is that of the American socio-linguist, William Labov. In his famous article, 'The logic of non-standard English' [2], he argued that the evidence for the 'deficit' thesis was thoroughly suspicious, and that both empirical and conceptual confusions infected its proponents' talk of grammaticality, rules of language, and the like. But most important, judged by its effects, was Labov's near-reversal of the usual judgements made on the merits or demerits of 'standard' and 'non-standard' speech. The 'elaborated' code, he argued, is mainly characterised by its 'verbosity', While NNE (Non-Standard Negro English) is distinguished by its clarity and conciseness, besides being free from any of the 'illogicality' attributed to it by some writers. It would be reasonable, I think, to regard Labov's position as the new orthodoxy on this issue. Many of the quotations 177

Three Models of Narrative Comprehension in William Stafford's “Traveling through the Dark”: Some Relations between Schemata and Interpretive Context (Part 1)

This paper discusses the mechanisms involved in accounting for William Stafford's poem “Traveling Through the Dark.” Part 1 presents the narrative models of Teun van Dijk and William Labov, while Part 2 continues the discussion of Labov's Model, introduces Stanley Fish's view of narrative, and relates all three models to Roger Schank's and Robert de Beaugrande's theoretical work on stories. In the conclusion, a number of criteria for the evaluation of narrative theories are suggested.

William Labov (ed.), Locating language in time and space. (Quantitative Analyses of Linguistic Structure 1, W. Labov & D. Sankoff series editors.) New York: Academic Press, 1980, Pp. xx + 271.

William Labov (ed.), Locating language in time and space. (Quantitative Analyses of Linguistic Structure 1, W. Labov & D. Sankoff series editors.) New York: Academic Press, 1980, Pp. xx + 271. - Volume 12 Issue 1

Attitudes and Language Behaviour

One of the recent developments in sociolinguistics is the investigation of the relationship between a speaker’s personal disposition or cultural value system and his language behaviour. William Labov (1963) notes that a tendency of the inhabitants of Martha’s Vineyard to modify their pronunciation of diphthongs relates to their feelings of resentment towards intruders from the mainland United States. In a later publication, Labov (1964:94) observes that language may be viewed as a system for integrating cultural values, and he cites the conflict of value systems as a probable cause for the failure of students to acquire Standard English despite their exposure to 12 years of teaching. Although in many instances value systems may closely parallel social classes, certain types of values, such as those associated with political and religious persuasions, for example, cut across socio-economic classes. It follows from this that, by isolating attitudes from socio-economic class descriptions, a more accurate assessment can be made of their effects on language behaviour.In English-speaking Canada, and particularly in British Columbia, some Canadians identify themselves culturally with Britain and its people, some with the United States, and others actively seek a uniquely Canadian identity. The reasons for these differences in outlook are not difficult to find, given the history of the settlement of Canada and of its political and economic development. Nor is it surprising that Canadian English has been characterized as “a dialect which resembles American English in some respects and British English in others and includes, at the same time, a great deal that is significantly Canadian” (Avis 1966:19). This paper attempts to show that the attitudes referred to above are reflected in language usage.

The Origin of the Verbal -S in Black English

ONE OF THE CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES in study of black English has been verb morphology, particularly synchronic status and diachronic provenance of paradigmatically related present tense verb endings -s and zero. The observation that third person singular -s is frequently deleted by lower class black speakers has lead to assumption that the third singular present tense marker is not required in black dialect (Lanier 1976, p. 51; cf. Funkhouser 1973, pp. 809-10, 819; Fickett 1972, p. 17; Loflin, Sobin, and Dillard 1973, p. 24; Smitherman 1977, p. 26). This view was originally offered by creolists in connection with creole substratum hypothesis, which suggests a creole origin of dialects spoken by blacks in United States (cf. e.g., Dillard 1972, pp. 40-42; Traugott 1976, p. 88); for use of uninflected verb forms is typical of pidgin and creole languages, e.g., Gullah (Turner 1949, p. 224; Van Sertima 1976, p. 141), Haitian Creole (Hall 1966, p. 109) and West African Pidgin English (Grade 1892, p. 383), which reveals influence of African languages (Turner 1948, p. 78; cf. Hall 1966, p. 109; Van Sertima 1976, p. 141). By virtue of results of recent sociolinguistic research, which has shown uninflected verb to be predominant third person singular form in black English, this hypothesis has obtained considerable support among sociolinguists as well (e.g., Fasold and Wolfram 1970, pp. 63-64; Fasold 1971; Fasold 1981, pp. 170-71; Labov 1970b, p. 230).' William Labov infers from relatively high proportion of zero forms, lack of stylistic variation, and inefficacy of phonological constraints, that there is no underlying third singular -s in NNE [Nonstandard Negro English] (Labov, Cohen, Robins, and Lewis 1968, 1: 164). Within this theoretical framework, existing -s suffixes in black English have been interpreted, if in third person singular, as post-creole interference from standard English, or, if in any other grammatical person, as hypercorrect usage,2 as is explained by Burling (1973, p. 49):

REVIEW

Therapeutic Discourse: Psychotherapy, as Conversarion. William Labov and David FansheLTeaching Languages: A Way and Ways. Earl W. Stevick.Everyday Mother Talk to Toddlers: Eorly Intervention. Frances Fuchs Schachter.

Tense variation in narrative

TENSE VARIATION IN NARRATIVE Deborah Schiffrin University ofPennsylvania The narrative is a naturally bound unit ofdiscourse in which both formal and functional aspects of grammatical variation can be examined in a controlled and systematic way. This paper is a quantitative analysis of the past and the historical-present tenses as alternative ways of referring to past events in narrative. It shows how the organization of narrative delimits the area in which the historical present can occur, and how various structural and functional constraints restrict (or favor) switching between the two tenses. It also shows that the historical present evaluates narrative events because it is a use of the present tense, and that switching out of the historical present separates narrative events from each other.* The oral narrative is an ideal site for the quantitative study of variation in discourse ; because it is a naturally bound unit of discourse with a regular internal structure, both formal and functional aspects of variation can be examined in a controlled and systematic way. However, despite much recent work on how narratives are constructed and performed (e.g. Bennett 1977, Knapp 1976, Labov 1972, Polanyi 1979), there has been little use of quantitative methods in the analysis of grammatical variation within narrative. Thus we have, on the one hand, a well-developed methodology for analysing linguistic variation, and, on the other hand, a rich body of qualitative descriptions of narrative, but few studies which utilize the advantages of both approaches. This paper examines tense variation in narrative. The historical-present tense—the use of the present tense to refer to past events—alternates with the past tense in narrative. In the following fragment of narrative, events are understood as having occurred prior to the moment of speaking, regardless of the tense of the verb:1 * I am indebted to Anthony Kroch and William Labov for helpful comments on and criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper. Anne Bower, John Fought, Phyllis Nudelman, Ellen Prince, and Louis Scavo have also provided useful suggestions. An earlier and shorter version, using slightly different data, was presented at the 1978 LSA Annual Meeting, Boston. ' Narratives used in this study were primarily from sociolinguistic interviews conducted by members of a research project studying language change and variation in the Philadelphia speech community (NSF-75-00245, Principal Investigator: William Labov), and to a lesser extent from data collected by members of the Linguistics 560 class in 1976 and 1977. I thank everyone for allowing me access to their narratives. Special thanks go to Anne Bower, whose own interest in narratives no doubt contributed to her success in eliciting them—and, ofcourse, to William Labov, whose systematic collection of narratives made the job of looking for the HP much easier. Note that Wolfson 1976, 1978 has argued that narratives told during sociolinguistic interviews are not likely to contain the HP—that it is more likely when speaker and hearer share norms of interpretation and evaluation. As Anthony Kroch has suggested (p.c.), increased use of the HP in interview narratives can thus be seen as an indication ofbetter fieldwork methods, with interviews becoming more like natural conversational situations. For descriptions of sociolinguistic fieldwork methods in general, and of methods used in the Philadelphia project, see Labov et al. 1979. In all examples of excerpts from narratives, only clauses which represent narrative events (clauses in the complicating action section) are lettered. Each line of transcript with a letter preceding it contains one complicating action clause, and the letter indicates only the clause on that 45 46LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) (1) a. Then all of a sudden everybody gets involved. b.and they made a mess. c.So uh ... this lady says ... uh this uh Bert, Oh, my son'll make them. He's an electrician.' d.So he makes them, e.and he charges all the neighbors twenty dollars a set, and there I paid three dollars. f.So I called her a crook. g.And I called her son a crook. h. So, they were really mad at me. Here clauses b and f-h contain past-tense verbs (P), while clauses a and c-e contain historical-present verbs...

Variation and Change in Alabama English : A Sociolinguistic Study of the White Community. Crawford Feagin (foreword by William Labov), pp. xv, 395. Washington, D. C. : Georgetown University Press, 1979

Variation and Change in Alabama English : A Sociolinguistic Study of the White Community. Crawford Feagin (foreword by William Labov), pp. xv, 395. Washington, D. C. : Georgetown University Press, 1979

An Interview with William Labov

An Interview with William Labov

An Interview with William Labov

An Interview with William Labov

SITUATIONAL VARIABILITY IN THE SPEECH OF PRESCHOOL CHILDREN*

A common observation among psychologists, dating back at least to the 1920s (cf. Issacs, 1930; Piaget, 1923; Vygotsky, 1978), is that children appear to talk in a more sophisticated way and to accomplish more complicated intellectual acts in the course of spontaneous interactions with their social and physical environments than they do when they are being interrogated by adults. There are, generally speaking, two lines of explanation for this observation. Arguing from somewhat different developmental perspectives, Piaget and Vygotsky both claimed that spontaneous problem-solving was, in general, easier than problem-solving at the instigation of adults, which requires that the child respond in terms of special rules that restrict her response options in various ways. Although she did not take up this topic in a formal fashion, Issacs interpreted performance differences associated with spontaneous and elicited problem solving differently. She believed that the young child performed better in spontaneously generated, everyday interactions because the contents of those interactions are things the child knows and cares about (in contrast with the content of adult questions used for cognitive assessments, which are arbitrary, uninteresting, and perhaps alien in content as well). This issue has taken on considerable contemporary importance for both practical and theoretical reasons. Practically, the search for cognitive assessment devices that would be valid across different ethnic and language groups has led to repeated reassessments of the standardized cognitive and linguistic tests used to screen young children entering educational programs or for evaluation of those programs (cf. Raizen and Bobrow, 1974). A common claim by critics of standardized tests echoes Issac’s dissatisfaction with Piaget many years ago: in the modern context, it is claimed that minority-group youngsters know less and care less about the contexts of standardized tests than do their Anglo, middle-class counterparts. In effect, the argument goes, tests are biased against minority group youngsters because of test content and language. There is also widespread feeling that the social interactions embodied in standardized testing situations are themselves a source of performance differences. This latter claim has been made most forcefully by William Labov, who stated that failure of Black English Vernacular speakers is not the result of a deficit in the children but of failures in the educational system itself: (1) the failure to take into account the child’s dialect; (2) the failure to assess Black children’s intellectual competence accurately; and (3) the failure to implement policies to remedy (1) and (2).

Therapeutic Discourse: Psychotherapy as Conversation. By William Labov and David Fanshel. New York: Academic Press, 1977. 392 pp. $15.00

Therapeutic Discourse: Psychotherapy as Conversation. By William Labov and David Fanshel. New York: Academic Press, 1977. 392 pp. $15.00

Black English - Robbins Burling, English in black and white. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1973. Pp. ix+178. - William Labov, Language in the inner city: studies in the Black English vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972, Pp. xxiv+412.

Black English - Robbins Burling, English in black and white. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1973. Pp. ix+178. - William Labov, Language in the inner city: studies in the Black English vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972, Pp. xxiv+412. - Volume 4 Issue 2

LANGUAGE IN THE INNER CITY: STUDIES IN THE BLACK ENGLISH VERNACULAR. By William Labov and SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS. By William Labov

LANGUAGE IN THE INNER CITY: STUDIES IN THE BLACK ENGLISH VERNACULAR. By William Labov and SOCIOLINGUISTIC PATTERNS. By William Labov Get access Doris R. Entwisle Doris R. Entwisle The Johns Hopkins University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 53, Issue 4, June 1975, Pages 658–659, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/53.4.658-a Published: 01 June 1975

Black English: An Essay Review: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of American Black English . Ila Wales Brasch, Walter Milton Brasch. ; English in Black and White . Robbins Burling. ; Black Jargon in White America . David Claerbaut. ; Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States . J. L. Dillard. ; Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel

One of the legacies of the various Pride movements of the sixties has been the proliferation of books on Black English. This has been ably and amply documented by the Brasches' fine bibliography. It was not until the scholarly community could conceive of black Americans as having sufficiently distinctive patterns of culture that such studies were carried out or found much of an audience. Before that, of course, black language was commonly accounted for in the same way as other Afro-American behaviors, as evidences of some essential cultural disability. Even the standard work on ethnic continuity and diversity in the United States, Glazer and Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot, could not get beyond

Black Rhetorical Patterns and the Teaching of Composition

ENGLISH TEACHERS, particularly composition teachers, constantly face the problem of teaching writing to speakers of what William Labov calls Black English Vernacular (hereafter referred to as BEV).' BEV refers to the relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black youth in most parts of the United States, especially in the inner-city areas of New York, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. In addition, BEV is spoken in many rural areas of the South and is often used by adults for casual or intimate conversations.

William Labov, Sociolinguistic patterns. (Conduct and Communication, 4.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972.

William Labov, Sociolinguistic patterns. (Conduct and Communication, 4.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972.