19 Facts About William Labov

William David Labov was an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics.

William Labov has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics, and "one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries".

William Labov retired in 2015 but continued to publish research until his death in 2024.

William Labov was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and raised in Rutherford, moving to Fort Lee at age 12.

William Labov attended Harvard University, where he majored in English and philosophy and studied chemistry.

William Labov took his PhD at Columbia University, studying under Uriel Weinreich.

William Labov was an assistant professor of linguistics at Columbia before becoming an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971, then a full professor, and in 1976 becoming director of the university's Linguistics Laboratory.

The methods William Labov used to collect data for his study of the varieties of English spoken in New York City, published as The Social Stratification of English in New York City, have been influential in social dialectology.

William Labov pursued research in referential indeterminacy and is noted for his studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives.

Later, William Labov studied ongoing changes in the phonology of English as spoken in the US, as well as the origins and patterns of chain shifts of vowels.

William Labov's stated purpose is to "isolate the elements of narrative".

William Labov describes narrative as having two functions: referential and evaluative, with its referential functions orienting and grounding a story in its contextual world by referencing events in sequential order as they originally occurred, and its evaluative functions describing the storyteller's purpose in telling the story.

William Labov argues that narrative units must retell events in the order they were experienced because narrative is temporally sequenced.

William Labov defines narrative clause as the "basic unit of narrative" around which everything else is built.

De Fina agrees with Langellier that William Labov's model ignores the complex and often quite relevant subject of intertextuality in narrative.

William Labov died at his home in Philadelphia on December 17,2024, at the age of 97 from complications due to Parkinson's.

In 1968, Labov received the David H Russell Award for Distinguished Research in Teaching English.

William Labov received honorary doctorates from, among others, the Faculty of Humanities at Uppsala University and University of Edinburgh.

In 2020, William Labov was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Talcott Parsons Prize, recognizing "distinguished and original contributions to the social sciences".