William Labov at 90: Creating a socially realistic linguistics
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18349/MagyarNyelv.2018.1.1Keywords:
William Labov, sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, socially realistic linguistics, linguistic variation and change, urban dialectology, linguistic and educational equityAbstract
Based on his plenary lecture at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Hungarian Linguistics on 24 January 2018, the author celebrates William Labov, who created a socially realistic linguistics, the study of variation and change, or sociolinguistics for short. Labov’s oeuvre and its major tenets are briefly reviewed. E. F. K. Koerner’s (2001) characterization of Labovian sociolinguistics as an “antidote to the kind of work that has come out of the Chomskyan ‘paradigm’” is cited with approval, as is Gregory Guy’s (2011) hope that “By conjoining the findings of sociolinguistics with the best products of formal linguistic thinking, we can illuminate a path towards a genuine science of language."
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Copyright (c) 2024 Miklós Kontra
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