Towards a Social Science of Language: Papers in Honor of William Labov. Volume 1: Variation and Change in Language and Society

455 Pages·1996·42.887 MB·

by  Gregory R. Guy, Crawford Feagin, Deborah Schiffrin, John Baugh (Eds.)

TOWARDS A SOCIAL SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE
AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
General Editor
E. F. KONRAD KOERNER
(University of Ottawa)
Series IV - CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY
Advisory Editorial Board
Henning Andersen (Los Angeles); Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles)
Thomas V. Gamkrelidze (Tbilisi); John E. Joseph (Hong Kong)
Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin); Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.)
E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Danny Steinberg (Tokyo)
Volume 127
Gregory R. Guy, Crawford Feagin, Deborah Schiffrin and John Baugh (eds)
Towards a Social Science of Language
TOWARDS A SOCIAL
SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE
PAPERS IN HONOR OF WILLIAM LABOV
VOLUME 1
VARIATION AND CHANGE
IN LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY
Edited by
GREGORY R. GUY
CRAWFORD FEAGIN
DEBORAH SCHIFFRIN
JOHN BAUGH
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Towards a social science of language : papers in honor of William Labov / edited by Gregory
R. Guy ... [et al.].
p. cm. -- (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series
IV, Current issues in linguistic theory, ISSN 0304-0763 ; v. 127)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 1. Variation and change in language and society.
1. Sociolinguistics. I. Guy. Gregory R. II. Labov, William. III. Series.
P40.T68 1995
306.4'4-dc20 95-46466
ISBN 90 272 3630 5 (Eur.) / 1-55619-581-8 (US) (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1996 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA
William Labov

Contents
Preface ix
Foreword xv
Michael K
I. The Social Organization of Variation and Change
Dialect Typology: Isolation, Social Network and Phonological Structure 3
Peter Trudgill
Dialect and Style in the Speech of Upper Class Philadelphia 23
Anthony Kroch
(ay) Goes To the City. Exploring the Expressive Use of Variation 47
Penelope Eckert
Social Class and Language Variation in Bilingual Speech Communities 69
Raymond Mougeon & Édouard Beniak
"Why do women do this?" Sex and Gender Differences in Speech 101
Niloofar Haeri
Interactional Conditioning of Linguistic Heterogeneity 115
Claude Paradis
Peaks and Glides in Southern States Short-a 135
Crawford Feagin
Denasalization of the Velar Nasal in Tokyo Japanese:
Observations in Real Time 161
Junko Hibiya
II. The Linguistic Structure of Variation and Change
Variation and Drift: Loss of Agreement in Germanic 173
Charles A. Ferguson
Turning Different at the Turn of the Century:
19th Century Brazilian Portuguese 199
Fernando Tarallo
Form and Function in Linguistic Variation 221
Gregory R. Guy
The History of the Ancient Hebrew Modal System and Labov's Rule
of Compensatory Structural Change 253
Richard . Steiner
viii Contents
Phonetic Evidence for the Evolution of Lexical Classes:
The Case of a Montreal French Vowel Shift 263
Malcah Yaeger-Dror
Phonological Rule Set Complexity in a Very Large Vocabulary Word
Recognition System 289
Philip Franz Seitz & Matthew Lennig
III. African-American Varieties of English
The Origins of Variation in Guyanese 311
Derek Bickerton
The Urbanization of Creole Phonology: Variation and Change in
Jamaican (KYA) 329
Peter L. Patrick
Copula Variability in Jamaican Creole and African American
Vernacular English: A Reanalysis of DeCamp's Texts 357
John R. Rickford
Contraction and Deletion in Vernacular Black English:
Creole History and Relationship to Euro-American English 373
Ralph W. Fasold & Yoshiko Nakano
Dimensions of a Theory of Econolinguistics 397
John Baugh
William Labov: A bibliography 421
Index 429
Preface
This book is intended to provide a survey and a synthesis of the field that may
be called 'Labovian linguistics' — the research areas and methods that were
pioneered, and are still being sustained and inspired, by William Labov. This
discipline has long lacked a suitable name. The term most commonly applied
to it is 'sociolinguistics', which has its merits, but is often misconstrued as
involving nothing more than the enumeration of the social correlates of
certain linguistic features — a sort of perpetual rewriting of a few chapters of
The Social Stratification of English in New York City (Labov 1966). For this
reason, Labov himself has often preferred to characterize his own work
merely as 'linguistics'. While this makes a rhetorically effective aphorism, it
is deficient as a general term for the Labovian field, because it neither
captures the distinctive characteristics of that approach, nor contrasts it with
other areas of linguistics that are not Labovian. And even the term 'Labovian'
is inappropriate; although convenient and readily apprehensible for informal
purposes, it tends to undermine what it tries to describe. The central feature of
the approach to the study of language that Labov has always espoused is the
'dynamic paradigm': that is, seeing language not as a static structure but as a
dynamic social system, which is continuously moving, changing, interacting,
and working. It would be profoundly undynamic of us to fix a cult of
personality around the pioneer, and name the field after him.
We have therefore preferred to define the field in terms of its methods
and goals, rather than its subject matter or its practitioners. Hence, the title of
this book is Towards a Social Science of Language. We want to pursue a
"science of language", because we seek to do work that is empirically
founded, and follows Labov's 'principle of accountability'; it is a "social
science", because we want to account for language use, and because language
itself is quintessentially social, the fundamental medium for the creation and
maintenance of distinctively human society. And finally, we say "towards" in
recognition of the dynamism of the discipline itself: we are part of a process,
not an edifice.