What do you know about the New York study of William Labov?
William Labov worked on a classic study on social stratification for New York City speech. He was able to illustrate the social stratification of (r) in N.Y.C. department stores. That is, in expressions such as fourth floor, whose pronunciation was tested by Labov, /r/ was either pronounced or omitted.
What did William Labov study?
Labov studied English and philosophy at Harvard University, earning his B.A. in 1948, and worked as an industrial chemist for a decade. In 1961, he entered graduate school in linguistics at Columbia University and under the direction of Uriel Weinreich completed his Ph. D. in 1964.
When did Labov NY study?
1966
In 1962, Labov ([1966] 2006) completed the “New York department store study,” which examined overt prestige involving class, ethnicity, and gender. He investigated the pronunciation of postvocalic /r/ in New York City speech, in the words fourth and floor.
What did William Labov’s fourth floor study show?
The 1966 study was conducted by William Labov, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, who went to New York to study how people say the letter “r.” He found that many people of the working class frequently deleted the letter “r” in words like “car” and “birth.” He wanted to see if speakers from different …
What did Labov find out?
What did he find out? Labov found that the pronunciation of certain vowel sounds were subtly changing from the standard American pronunciations and noted that locals had a tendency to pronounce these diphthongs with a more central point, more like [əu, əi].
What three groups did Labov look at in Martha’s Vineyard study?
Labov interviewed native Vineyarders of different ages from longstanding British, Portuguese, and Wampanoag families. The study on Martha’s Vineyard was Labov’s master’s thesis and was published in a 1963 article in Word, the journal of the Linguistics Circle of New York.
What is Labov theory?
William Labov (b. Labov’s research demonstrates that linguistic variation is pervasive and highly structured, revealing regular patterns of co-occurrence between language forms, such as the pronunciation of a particular vowel, and social categories, such as socioeconomic classes.
What did Labov study in New York City?
In particular, he has focused his research on dialects in the US. He was a pioneer of the field in many ways. One of his most well known studies is the one he conducted in 1966 on the socioeconomic differences of speech patterns in New York City. The study was published as The Social Stratification of English in New York City .
Which is the best chapter of William Labov?
This chapter is an account of the systematic use of rapid and anonymous observations in a study of the sociolinguistic structure of the speechcommunity.1 This chapter deals primarily with the sociolinguistic study of New York City.
Where was Labov’s New York department store located?
Labov’s New York Department Store Labov’s research in the Lower East Side of New York City showed that individual speech patterns were part of a highly systematic structure of social and stylistic stratification.
Why did Labov come up with the term R?
As individuals do not change their speech very much as they age, we can study younger and older speakers as a way of looking at language change in a community. In the case of /r/ and New York City, Labov’s department store study confirmed that the city was moving away from r-lessness and towards a more standard American English ‘r-fulness’.
