Towards a Social Science of Language: Papers in honor of William Labov. Volume 1: Variation and change in language and society(Towards a Social Science of Language)

This is a two-volume collection of original research papers designed to reflect the breadth and depth of the impact that William Labov has had on linguistic science. Four areas of 'Labovian' linguistics are addressed: First is the study of variation and change; the papers in sections I and II of the first volume take this as their central theme, with a focus on either the social context and uses of language (I) or on the the internal linguistic dynamics of variation and change (II). The study of African American English, and other language varieties in the Americas spoken by people of African descent and influenced by their linguistic heritage, is the subject of the papers in section III of the first volume. The third theme is the study of discourse; the papers in section I of the second volume develop themes in Labovian linguistics that go back to Labov's work on narrative, descriptive, and therapeutic discourse. Fourth is the emphasis on language use, the search for discursive, interactive, and meaningful determinants of the complexity in human communication. Papers with these themes appear in section II of the second volume.

Table of Contents:
1. Preface; 2. Foreword (by Kac, Michael B.); 3. I. The Social organization of variation and change; 4. Dialect typology: isolation, social network and phonological structure (by Trudgill, Peter); 5. Dialect and style in the speech of upper class Philadelphia (by Kroch, Anthony S.); 6. (ay) Goes to the city. Exploring the expressive use of variation (by Eckert, Penelope); 7. Social class and language variation in Bilingual speech communities (by Mougeon, Raymond); 8. "Why do women do this?" Sex and gender differences in speech (by Haeri, Niloofar); 9. Interactional conditioning of linguistic heterogeneity (by Paradis, Claude); 10. Peaks and glides in southern states short-a (by Feagin, Crawford); 11. Denasalization of the velar nasal in Tokyo Japanese: Observations in real time (by Hibiya, Junko); 12. II. The linguistic structure of variation and change; 13. Variation and drift: loss of agreement in germanic (by Ferguson, Charles A.); 14. Turning different at the turn of the century: 19th century Brazilian Portuguese (by Tarallo, Fernando); 15. From and function in linguistic variation (by Guy, Gregory R.); 16. The history of the ancient Hebrew modal system and Labov's rule of compensatory structural change (by Steiner, Richard C.); 17. Phonetic evidence for the evolution of lexical classes: The case of a Montreal French vowel shift (by Yaeger-Dror, Malcah); 18. Phonological rule set complexity in a very large vocabulary word recognition system (by Seitz, Philip Franz); 19. III. African-American varieties of English; 20. The origins of variations in Guyanese (by Bickerton, Derek); 21. The urbanization of creole phonology: variation and change in Jamaican (KYA) (by Patrick, Peter L.); 22. Copula variability in Jamaican creole and African American vernacular English: A reanalysis of DeCamp's texts (by Rickford, John R.); 23. Contraction and deletion in vernacular black English: Creole history relationship to Euro-American English (by Fasold, Ralph W.); 24. Dimensions of a theory of econolinguistics (by Baugh, John); 25. William Labov: a bibliography; 26. Index