William Labov

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既にご存知の方もいらっしゃるかもしれませんが、アメリカの同僚からWilliam Labovの訃報が届きましたので転送させて頂きます。

馬塚れい子、理研CBS

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Dear Colleagues,

 

I write saddened by news of the passing of William Labov: one of the greats.
Below is a write-up by Language Log.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=67399

Bill Labov

December 17, 2024 @ 7:40 pm · Filed by Cynthia McLemore and Mark Liberman under Obituaries, Sociolinguistics

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William Labov, known far and wide as one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away this morning at the age of 97, with his wife, Gillian Sankoff, by his side.

Bill is still very alive to us, so many of us, here at Penn. His voice reverberates. Mark is working on a longer, more detailed appreciation.

For now, a warm memory. One night over dinner Bill said that when he wrote he liked to imagine a scholar in the library, perhaps in some faraway place or distant future, opening one of his books and finding a useful insight, just as he had from scholars before him. We got to see him receive news about such an occurrence one evening at that same table: a guest hand-delivered, from the hills of Sindhi-speaking Pakistan, a sociolinguistic book inscribed with thanks for his insight, inspiration, and example.

Here’s a favorite picture of Bill turning to say goodbye one Thanksgiving afternoon. Farewell, dear friend.

update — Some other early remembrances:

Neerlandistiek
Bluesky
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And this is worth a look, if you haven't read it: Jack Chambers, "William Labov: An Appreciation", Annual Review of Linguistics, 2017.

Also, just as Bill passed, the LDC completed the transcription and anonymization of the audio tapes from his influential 1961 field work in Martha's Vineyard, described in "The social motivation of a sound change", Word 1963, and elsewhere. The results will be published as soon as quality control, metadata analysis, and documentation are complete.

As he wrote in his 1987 paper "How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it":

My first research was on the little island of Martha's Vineyard off Cape Cod. My friend Murray Lerner, the film maker, invited me up there. There I noticed a peculiar way of pronouncing the words right, ice, sight, with the vowel in the middle of the mouth, that was stronger among young people, but varied a great deal by occupation, by island locale, or by the speaker's background–Yankee, Portuguese, or Indian. I interviewed people all over the Vineyard, and among them I found some of the finest users of the English language I had ever known.

As I finally figured out, the Martha's Vineyard sound change was serving as a symbolic claim to local rights and privileges, and the more someone tried to exercise that claim, the stronger was the change. This became my M.A. essay, and I gave it as a paper before the Linguistic Society of America. In those days, there was only a single session, and you practically addressed the entire profession when you advanced to the podium. I had imagined a long and bitter struggle for my ideas, where I would push the social conditioning of language against hopeless odds, and finally win belated recognition as my hair was turning gray. But my romantic imagination was cut short. They ate it up!

See also the discussions of Bill's work in "The state of speech-to-text", 8/11/2023.

 

December 17, 2024 @ 7:40 pm · Filed by Cynthia McLemore and Mark Liberman under Obituaries, Sociolinguistics