Labov- New York Department Store Study

7 Key excerpts on "Labov- New York Department Store Study"

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  Hard-Science Linguistics

  • Victor Yngve, Zdzislaw Wasik(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  PART IV VARIATIONAL AND HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS This page intentionally left blank Chapter 12 Moving a Classic Applied Linguistics Study into the Real World Douglas W. Coleman The work of William Labov has been extremely influential in the field of applied linguistics. One of the reasons is that his work has tended to be very well designed from a research standpoint. This paper focuses on his classic study ’The social stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores’ (1972). In it, he identifies what he refers to as ’the linguistic variable (r)’ -’the presence or absence of consonantal [r] in postvocalic position’ - and attempts to correlate it with the social status of New York City speakers. The particular strengths of Labov’s investigation into this issue are outstanding. But there are also a few elements of the research which present weaknesses. I will deal with both below. Yngve (1996) argues convincingly that ’business as usual’ in linguistics falls within a philosophical, rather than a scientific, domain. In examining Labov’s study of ’(r)’ , I will place special emphasis not only on typical considerations of research design, but also on the degree to which Labov escapes the philosophical traps of ’business as usual’ in linguistics and successfully conducts a study wholly within the physical domain of science. In doing so, it will be my intention to show that at least some of what Yngve has metaphorically called the territory of the ’old country’ of linguistics in the logical domain can, in fact, be taken along as we undertake the task of ’emigrating from the logical domain to the physical [the new world]’ (Yngve 1996:105). 1. The focus of Labov's research Labov (1972) presents a sociolinguistic study conducted of New York City speakers. He identifies this immediately at the outset of his

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  Studying Dialect

  • Rob Penhallurick(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  A language such as English varies according to its geography. At the same time, it will vary according to social class – not all speakers from the same locality will speak the same dialect of English uniformly if those speakers vary in social class. The speech of the locality as a whole can vary along a non-standard to standard continuum that correlates largely with social stratification. Similarly, the local speech may vary in regular patterns that become apparent when the linguistic data is matched with information about the age, sex, and ethnicity of speakers. What is more, each individual dialect speaker will tend to vary his or her own speech according to the social situation, in relation to such factors as the perceived informality/formality of the context and the social class of the other interlocutors. We each may pronounce any given word differently not only in comparison to other speakers but also according to whether we are speaking to friends or to strangers, whether we are in a bar or at home or in work or in a classroom, and so on. If the investigator of dialect ignores such social and stylistic correlations, then it is likely that the data will appear to contain what looks like quite random or ‘free’ variation. But when the sociolinguistic correlations are made, this random variation might assume regular patterning, and its causes are revealed. The variation then appears not random but structured. What we see is ‘orderly’ or ‘structured heterogeneity’, to use the terms first developed by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968) in a paper given at a conference at the University of Texas in 1966. For as long as dialectologists focused on the speech of one class (rural working class) and one age-group (elderly), it was to some extent defensible to neglect these correlations. However, when the focus expanded it was time for the methods, aims, and general approach to evolve in new directions. The notion of structured heterogeneity is central to the sociolinguistic way of doing dialect study, as Weinreich, Labov and Herzog stated in 1966: ‘The key to a rational conception of language change – indeed, of language itself – is the possibility of describing orderly differentiation in a language serving a community’ (1968, no page number, online version). (In the process some aspects of the older dialectological approach became newly neglected, for a while at least. As noted above, the sociolinguistic approach in its early days was less concerned with vocabulary, with dictionaries and atlases and national-scale projects, and with history.)

  6.4.1 NYC 1966: Labov’s variables and contextual styles

  We have seen how Labov broke with tradition in his New York City department store study. His innovations are played out much more fully in the larger survey. In this he increased the number of phonological variables to five:

  1.(r), as before, that is, presence or absence of /r/.

  2.(æh), by which he refers to variation in the height of the vowel in words like ask, bad, bag, cash, dance, pass – one of the ways in which vowel sounds are classified is according to their height, that is, the relative height of the tongue during articulation; the lower variants in these words in NYC are associated with prestige.

  3.(oh), that is, variation in the height of the vowel in words like all, awed, caught, dog, lost, off, talk; the lower variants are associated with prestige, though less consistently than in (æh) in NYC.

  4.(th), that is, articulation of th- as in thing varying between fricative [θ] and plosive [t], the former being the prestige form, and the latter having less prestige.

  5.(dh), that is, articulation of th- as in then varying between fricative [ð] and plosive [d], the former being the prestige form, the latter having less prestige.

  Labov selected these phonological variables because they are high in frequency and are amenable to statistical analysis on a linear scale, and they ‘have a certain immunity from conscious suppression’ (1966/2006, p. 32; italics in original), that is to say, speakers are less conscious of their prestige-value than they would be with grammatical and lexical variables.

  Labov also refined his investigation of stylistic variation by setting up four contextual styles, some with subcategories (1966/2006, pp. 58–74), each associated with a different elicitation technique:

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  Quantitative Methods in Sociolinguistics

  • Ronald Macaulay(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  57 6 Some Individual Studies The comments that follow are not intended to provide comprehensive reviews of the works. Instead, they are limited to examining certain methodological procedures and to illustrating the wide variety of methods that investigators have employed. It shows that investigators have been remarkably inventive in the ways they have explored linguistic variation. One of the purposes of consider-ing these works together is to provide a convenient guide to future investigators as to the methodological decisions that have been made in earlier studies. My hope is that this information may make it easier for prospective investigators to avoid re-inventing the wheel or repeating the mistakes of others. For a variety of reasons I have limited the survey to book-length studies of studies dealing with English. Labov (2006) lists thirty-seven studies that followed the example of his New York study (Labov, 1966) more than half of them in languages other than English but generally does not examine the methodology in detail. William Labov (1966) The Social Stratification of English in New York City Even forty years after its original publication, it is a humbling experience to re-read this work and summarize the many methodological innovations it contains. While Labov was conducting exploratory interviews for the project, he discovered that there had been a comprehensive survey of the Lower East Side by the Mobilization for Youth project and he was able to select a socially stratified sample of native speakers. From a target sample of 195 speakers, he was able to collect interviews from 122 speakers, of which Labov carried out 102, and Michael Kac 20. Of the 73 speakers from the target sample who refused to be interviewed or could not be reached in time to be interviewed fully, Labov was able to elicit information from 33 by the ingenious device of asking questions about television preferences.

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  Introducing Sociolinguistics

  • Miriam Meyerhoff(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The rapid and anonymous survey of the realisation of (r) in three department stores is one of the most famous studies in sociolinguistics. As well as trialling a novel and easily replicable methodology, the department store survey has made a significant theoretical contribution to variationist sociolinguistics. Together with the sociolinguistic interviews in the Lower East Side, it demonstrates that quite different methods for gathering data, including quite different ways of manipulating attention to speech, can produce similar and mutually informative results. We noted that one advantage of the interview format for data collection is that it generates a large amount of information for subsequent analysis. Moreover, because the interviewer spends a fair amount of time getting to know the interviewee, they can make more sensitive evaluations when they come to assessing variation in and across social groups (we will return to the use of sociolinguistic interviews to gather this kind of data in Chapters 7 – 10). But one of the disadvantages of interviews is that they can take a long time to arrange and conduct. So it is often helpful to be able to complement them with methods that collect data more speedily. Labov chose three department stores as the venue for some quick fieldwork. He tried to elicit as many tokens of the phrase fourth floor as possible from staff working in the three stores. This phrase was a good one from a linguistic point of view because it has one token of the (r) variable before a consonant, and one token word- and phrase-finally. The decision to ask staff (and not, for instance, customers) was practical – staff were more likely to be able to give the desired answer. He would find some item on the store directory boards that was sold on the fourth floor, e.g., lamps or shoes, and he would ask staff where lamps, or shoes, were. They would say, ‘Fourth floor’, and then he’d pretend he hadn’t heard and ask them to repeat it

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  Cognitive Sociolinguistics Revisited

  • Gitte Kristiansen, Karlien Franco, Stefano De Pascale, Laura Rosseel, Weiwei Zhang, Gitte Kristiansen, Karlien Franco, Stefano De Pascale, Laura Rosseel, Weiwei Zhang(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  143 – 155. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William. 2006. The social stratification of English in New York City . 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lanwermeyer, Manuela, Karen Henrich, Marie J. Rocholl, Hanni T. Schnell, Alexander Werth, Jo-achim Herrgen and Jürgen E. Schmidt. 2016. Dialect variation influences the phonological and lexical-semantic word processing in sentences: Electrophysiological evidence from a cross-dialectal comprehension study. Frontiers in Psychology 7. 739. Nguyen, Dong, A. Seza Doğruöz, Carolyn P. Rosé, & Franciska de Jong. 2016. Computational so-ciolinguistics: A survey. Computational Linguistics 42 (3). 537 – 593. Ohala, John J. 1989. Sound change is drawn from a pool of sychronic variation. In L.E. Breivik & E.H. Jahr (eds.). Language change: Contributions to the study of its causes . Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 173 – 198. Paolillo, John. 2002. Analyzing linguistic variation. Statistical models and methods. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Pinget, Anne-France. 2015. The actuation of sound change . Utrecht University dissertation. Pinget, Anne-France, René Kager & Hans Van de Velde. 2020. Linking variation in perception and production in sound change: evidence from Dutch obstruent devoicing. Language and Speech 63(3). 660 – 685. Prikhodkine, Alexei Dennis Preston (eds.). 2015. Responses to language varieties: Variability, processes and outcomes. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rietveld, Toni & Roeland van Hout. 1993. Statistical techniques for the study of language and language behaviou r. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rosseel, Laura, Dirk Speelman & Dirk Geeraerts. 2019a. Measuring language attitudes in con-text: Exploring the potential of the Personalized Implicit Association Test. Language in So-ciety 48. 1 – 33. Laboratory Sociolinguistics | 571 Rosseel, Laura, Dirk Speelman & Dirk Geeraerts.

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  Studying Dialect

  • Rob Penhallurick(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  • Guide to variable-rule analysis . • Summary of Peter Trudgill’s research into Norwich English, 1968–88. • Explanation of principal components analysis and social network theory . Studying Dialect 202 Chapters 9 and 10 continue down this path by describing two major ‘post-sociolinguistic’ trends, perceptual dialectology ( Chapter 9) and geolinguistics ( Chapter 10). (You will have noticed immediately the interesting revival of the term dialectology in the first trend, made all the more interesting when we consider that the term geolinguistics was in the 1980s proposed as a new name for dialect study in its post-sociolinguistics form.) 7.2 The research that followed Labov’s New York City study In Chapter 6, I described Labov’s 1966 study of NYC English as the most seminal work of sociolinguistics. Labov’s early work helped found sociolin-guistics in general. More particularly, it created a productive strand of research within sociolinguistics, which we can call Labovian variationist sociolinguistics . After 1966, many researchers followed Labov’s lead, using and adapting his methods, interests, and aims in their own work. When reviewing this body of work in 2006, Labov himself characterized it as investigating language change and the structure of language by the study of linguistic variables in spon-taneous speech, using a representative sample of speakers from the speech community to provide the data (Labov, 1966/2006, p. 380). In his overview of this strand, the sociolinguist Robert Bayley (2013, p. 85) says that its central ideas are that ‘an understanding of language requires an understanding of variable as well as categorical [universal, invariable] processes and that vari-ation seen at all levels of language is not random’.

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  Making Waves

  The Story of Variationist Sociolinguistics

  • Sali A. Tagliamonte(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  tree. In 1970, Sandra goes to the LSA Summer Institute and hears about Labov’s work in New York City.

  Sandra Clarke 1

  And then I thought, “My gosh! This would be a wonderful place to do a Labovian study.” So lo and behold after the language attitude stuff I applied I think around 1980 to do essentially SSNYC16 in St John’s and I got the money.

  The St John’s Corpus was collected in the early 1980s. It comprises 200 people, five social strata, the two major ancestral backgrounds (Irish vs. English), and covers each of the neighborhoods in St John’s. Sandra says, “The overarching finding is that there is a top-down diffusion of linguistic features from the mainland. The new features come from upwardly mobile speakers and the changes filter down from the higher social strata and formal styles into casual conversation and the lower social classes.” Nevertheless, there is still an indigenous variety that is maintained. The result is that younger speakers have become progressively bidialectal. They can shift from the local dialect into Standard Canadian English (Clarke, 1991 ).

  Scandinavia

  Scandinavian Sociolinguistics was founded in dialectology but became decisively influenced by John Gumperz’s research on the difference between the insiders and the outsiders (Gumperz, 1964 ). This makes a lot of sense in Scandinavia where local dialects are used in informal styles and among insiders while the standard language is used with outsiders and in formal styles. Fieldwork to investigate this type of variation is typically done by doing interviews to get formal style and then taking people from the same community and putting them in groups in order to get informal styles. This type of fieldwork is predicated on the idea that people are fluently bidialectal. Mats Thelander and Bengt Nordberg, two sociolinguists at Uppsala University, were busy working on this strand of research in the 1970s. Danish Sociolinguistics has a different history. It began with more ideological concerns founded in socialist politics. Frans Gregersen at the University of Copenhagen is right in the middle of it.

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