Falling in love with humanity
Remembering Bill Labov
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20344965 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Betsy Sneller (0000-0002-2112-3064, Yale University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 699-714 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-05 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Diachronica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0176-4225 • E-ISSN: 1569-9714 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/dia.25046.sne |
| OpenAlex | W4414032030 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 24 |
William (Bill) Labov, pioneering scholar of language change, died on December 17, 2024. His MA and PhD theses in the mid 1960s revolutionized the field of language variation and change, and he spent the subsequent 60 years building on that foundation. This is a memoriam written by one of his final PhD students. This piece has two aims. The first is to invite you, the reader, into the feeling of being in Bill’s orbit. My hope is that by the end of it, you feel the same sort of love for him that many of us do. And the second is to convince you of my main thesis: that what is now understood as Bill’s genius could not have taken place without his preexisting love of humanity
Environmental ethics · Humanity · Sociology · Theology · History · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy · Psychology · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies
How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement
The Logic of Nonstandard English
Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts
The Social Stratification of English in New York City
The Amphichronic Program vs. Evolutionary Phonology
Diachrony and Diachronica
Unendangered Dialect, Endangered People
Uriel Weinreich
William Labov
Finding out about children’s language
Phonological rule spreading across hostile lines
Directions for Historical Linguistics
Systematically misleading data from test questions
Literacy Among African-American Youth
The Social Motivation of a Sound Change
How I got into linguistics, and what I got out of it
Afterword
Resolving the Neogrammarian Controversy
Some principles of linguistic methodology
Objectivity and commitment in linguistic science
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |