Pitch trace of the utterance "it's not that I", showing a peak on the negation not. A funky way of illustrating pitch? Pitch before Praat?

Labov, William & David Fanshel. 1977. Therapeutic discourse: psychotherapy as conversation. New York: Academic Press. [Figure 3, page 45]

William Labov at PBS, 'Do You Speak American?' What is Sociolinguistics?

Towards the beginning of my final term at university I wrote an article on the Universal Grammar hypothesis; my lecturer on child language learning had clearly taken the hypothesis as gospel, but I couldn’t quite accept it. I wrote that article as a means of getting my head around why I didn’t like it and I did two assessments (including one that directly asked about the hypothesis which was tough) where I had to avoid or, without antagonising the assessors, subtly explain my own views.

  I don’t think it got across.

  After an entire term of this I decided I would take the time to more fully expand on this and as I am now waiting on my final results, it seems the perfect time to do so.

 Let’s start with my lecturer and those classmates who agreed with her. Their view typically came from the Poverty of the Stimulus argument: how do children learn to speak properly if they are only ever exposed to adults who don’t speak properly? While the class was generally uninvolved in open discussion, what little was said generally matched the above statement; they didn’t think it was possible (which I interpret as being the Argument from Incredulity fallacy, which also happens to be the only logical fallacy I remember). And yes, how do children learn to speak “proper English” if they are not exposed to it?

  They don’t.

  It’s as simple as that, really. Why do regional dialects and accents exist? Because people learn to speak from their peers. Why do I and other Brits use Americanisms? Because America provides a huge amount of media and thus their vernacular gets a lot of representation.

  The problem with Chomsky, and thus my classmates, is that they seem to presume that children will learn to speak the ideal “English” language, which is especially annoying as we had spent two and a half years learning that there is no “wrong” language, just standard and non-standard. This “ideal” English seems to come from Chomsky’s concept of “linguistic competence” which is- well, the ideal; it’s the “perfect” speech that no-one actually uses and is contrasted with his notion of “linguistic performance” which people do speak.

  Chomsky isn’t studying language, he’s studying dictionaries.

 What we need to realise is that people speak like their peers and as time goes on and the more we develop and study more languages (and dialects of course), the less Universal Grammar can stand on its own two feet, if it ever really did. Although that’s not the only problem with it.

  It’s unnecessarily complicating language. As humans we learn more and more skills; we learn to crawl and to walk; we learn to hold and then to write; heck, some of us have to learn to chew! Is there anything more natural than eating? Learning is a natural process performed through observing, hypothesis testing (basically “will this work? let’s try it) and practice. Why should language be any different? Universal Grammar is basic human behaviour but with extra steps.

 William Labov, who my favourite lecturer referred to as the father of modern sociolinguistics (and whose work I have no problem with besides the stupid way he writes), said:

“It is now evident to many linguists that the primary purpose of the [performance/competence] distinction has been to help the linguist exclude data which he finds inconvenient to handle.”

Burn! That’s some brutal critique right there and I kinda love it. Best of all, that is probably the least confusing sentence that Labov ever wrote.

 I believe I mentioned in my previous article that modern children have different types of exposure such as television, radio and books that would help teach them their language, and while I still think this has an effect it does not seem to be enough on their own. Ewa Dabrowska (2015) wrote a fascinating paper on Universal Grammar and she references a number of studies on children raised by deaf parents. She expands on one study where a boy’s only real exposure to speech was frequent television viewing and it was only when he began to regularly interact with speaking adults that he began to acquire a level of language suited to his age.

  One of the reasons why I bring this up is because it suggests that it is not exposure alone that allows someone to learn a language. People need the opportunity to practice what they have learned in order to master it, which means thinking of the correct words, putting them in order and such and not just listening to them.

 But wait, if I’m going to put down Universal Grammar then surely I’m obligated to put a better idea forward? Well no, I’m not. But I will.

  First of all, there is Behaviourism by psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner in 1957; it’s imperfect but it relies on what we already see in a number of different areas including language. Children attempt to use language and correct utterances are positively reinforced through praise or rewards. I believe this is likely a large part of what does actually happen but attempts at using this has typically resulted in teaching methods that are boring and focuses on memorisation rather than actually learning (and I plan on doing an article on the difference).

  Then there’s the Interactionist approach that was made popular by Jerome Bruner (1983); this is probably my preferred theory as it takes into account what we see with Behaviourism while acknowledging that humans do have something different that allows our use of language. In short, where Behaviourism suggests that the learning process is more passive, Interactionism says that it’s the children interacting with and observing others that does it; I believe that the idea of reinforcement is absolutely part of the process, but Behaviourist teachers seem to look at it from a macro perspective where in reality we learn word by word.

 I’m not sure what else I can say, but briefly: Universal Grammar is reliant on unrealistic expectations of reality and we need to be looking at what we do see time and again. Learning from practice and reinforcement.

 Dąbrowska, E. (2015) “What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it?”, Frontiers in Psychology. 6:852. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00852 (accessed at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00852/full on 2nd of June 2019)

He died in December. I feel so out-of-touch, like my body is physically on the ground but my head is way up

William Labov was interested in phonological variation. He investigated the /au/ (ow) and /ai/ (eye) vowel sounds, in words such as mouse and mice, which in linguistic terms is called a diphthong. Martha’s Vineyard, a small island off the North east coast of America. At the time, the island had a population of approximately 5,800, however it is important to note that during the summer months this figure would swell as it was a popular holiday resort for up to 60,000 Americans.

What was his method?

Labov interviewed 69 people, each from different age, ethnic and social groups as to get a representative sample. Rather than getting his informants to read simple word lists, Labov used an interview technique to subtly encourage the participants to say the words containing the vowels which he wished to study. By using this research method Labov tried to avoid demand characteristics and make the conversation as natural as possible so that the participants didn’t necessarily know what Labov was looking for…

What did he find out?