THE PROBLEMS FACING THE LINGUISTIC

Problems that still confronting the discipline according with  Labov’s Principles Linguistic change (1994, 2001).

1. William Labov
2. William Labov is an American linguist, from  linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania. He is considered the founder of quantitative sociolinguistics and his work has focused on sociolinguistics and dialectology.

• Variation and change is a ubiquitous characteristic of language. Change inheres in its triple nature as system, activity and social institution (L¨udtke 1986, Keller 1994, Tuite 1999).
• Physiological and cognitive factors act as constraints upon certain types of change. Consonant lenitions are far more frequent than fortitions (Trask 1996: 55–60). Shifts in vowel features, such as height and anteriority, tend to follow predictable trajectories, as argued by Martinet (1964) and Labov (1994).
• Although the constraints in (2) assure a degree of regularity, even predictability, of linguistic change, the phenomenon is nonetheless fundamentally social in nature. Change is enacted and diffused in the intersubjective context of communication. Language use has an inherent indexical component, in that it continually signals, constructs, maintains and problematizes the multifaceted cluster of representations subsumed under the notion of “identity” (Silverstein 1996, 1998). Variation – different ways of saying “the same thing” – is the primary resource exploited in this process.
• For the above reason, among others, natural-science-like, desubjectivized models of variation and change must be complemented by hermeneutic approaches, which drawupon knowledge of various elements of the context of the phenomenon under study, as well as the investigators’ own instincts and imaginative capabilities as socially, historically, and culturally situated actors.