"What is to be learned?"
Dr. William Labov, University of Pennsylvania
Monday, October 3rd at 5:30 p.m., 116 Natural Science
This paper is an effort to define the target of the language learner: asking, what are the data that the child attends to in the process of becoming a native speaker? This question necessarily engages the definition of language in the largest sense. It is argued that the human language learning capacity is directed to the acquisition of the general pattern used in the speech community. Supporting this view is overwhelming evidence that children do not acquire the non-native features of their parents' speech, whether these are dialect differences or foreign accents. The end result is a high degree of uniformity in both the categorical and variable aspects of language production, where individual variation is reduced below the level of linguistic significance. The Atlas of North American English shows rotations of the vowels in the Inland North region surrounding the Great Lakes, involving some 34 million speakers, all moving in the same direction. The sharp dialect boundaries that separate the Inland North from the Midland confront us with the obverse problem of accounting for what children do not learn from closely neighboring speech communities.
Suggested Readings
Labov, W. (to appear) The Politics of Language Change. Virginia Press. [.pdf of chapters 1-3]