Origem e desenvolvimento das idéias lingüísticas de William Labov
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Data
2009-07-17
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Universidade Federal de Goiás
Resumo
This Dissertation aims at tracing the linguistic historiographic
trying to show the relevance of his studies of the nature of language and the internal and
social factors which motivate its change and their importance for the development of
and its genesis context, it was attempted to know his social history along with the
socioeconomic, historical and political contexts. Labov first majored in English and
Philosophy and, after that, in Chemistry, area in which he worked for a decade until his return
to University in 1961, when he started his studies in Linguistics. During this decade, the
United States society was going through its deepest social revolution which was motivated by
a movement that was committed with the attitudes of the left-wing politics, minority rights,
black consciousness, drugs, war experience and protests. Among these deep changes of
behavior and general tendencies, Labov developed his most important researches which
would, later, lead the claims for a new way of approaching Linguistics. This author must be
seen as a very original figure with a passion for science. His originality is to be found in his
capacity to develop an approach of empirical objectivist character, which methods are similar
to those of the exact sciences. His capacity of analyzing and understanding the world around
him allowed the author to judge as incoherent the behavior of the linguists of his time who
seemed to ignore the facts of the real world. His every day life experience and non-conformist
and progressive behavior allowed him to propose a new approach for the study of language
which would become a great area of study. These characteristics, allied to the feelings of
change that dominated the debates in the 1960s, turned him into an influential figure in the
science of language. Labov is worldwide known for having created the major part of the
components of the sociolinguistic methodology and for having introduced quantitative
techniques to the study of linguistic change and variation, making Linguistic a more social
and scientific field of study. His every day experiences showed him that to be right or wrong
about certain theory would directly affect the lives of the people involved. Labov brought to, that is, the knowledge of the
linguistic system was not the only important factor, but if that system was or was not ensuring
the success of people or keeping them from the access to the goods of social life. His texts are
characterized by long reviews of the linguistic literature, in which one can notice some
criticism but also the reaffirmation and recognition of the expertise of other theorists, and are,
besides this, frequent attempts to correct paradoxes in the history of Linguistics and overcome
restrictions to the study of the every day language. Of the observation of these different of his social history and that, in it, it is refracted the essence of the general thought of a time
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Citação
SILVA, Daniel Marra da. Origin and development of William Labov s linguistic ideas. 2009. 140 f. Dissertação (Mestrado em Lingüística, Letras e Artes) - Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia, 2009.