Origem e desenvolvimento das idéias lingüísticas de William Labov

• Autor(a) principal: SILVA, Daniel Marra da
• Data de Publicação: 2009
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFG
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.bc.ufg.br/tede/handle/tde/2433
• topic: William Labov; Língua, Mudança Lingüística; Sociolingüística; Historiografia Lingüística; William Labov; Language; Linguistic Change; Sociolinguistics; Linguistic Historiography; CNPQ::LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LINGUISTICA

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