William Labov

William Labov:
The methods he used to collect data for his study of the varieties of English spoken in New York City. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, his studies of the linguistic features of African American Vernacular English were also influential: he argued that AAVE should not be stigmatized as substandard, but respected as a variety of English with its own grammatical rules. He has also pursued research in referential indeterminacy, and he is noted for his seminal studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives.
More recently he has studied changes in the phonology of English as spoken in the United States today, and studied the origins and patterns of chain shifts of vowels, he and his co-authors find three major divergent chain shifts taking place today.
Labov was awarded the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science by the Franklin Institute with the citation "for establishing the cognitive basis of language variation and change through rigorous analysis of linguistic data, and for the study of non-standard dialects with significant social and cultural implications.