Labov says ‘New York poet Frederick Cozzens rhymed shore and pshaw in 1856′ Has anybody done historical linguistics using poetry? That’s so much data. One could study language change over thousands of years. I was just fascinated that rhyme could record phonetics. – indi

How & Why Men & Women Talk Different Eckert sez Gender Roles, not Biological Sex are crucial. Women are concerned with comparing their status vs. other Women. Same for men. Linguistic differentiation is more important to Women – Ecks sez this is because they have less access to Work. – Labov Women lead change from [...]

Labov studied language at Saks, Macy’s, and Klein (Walmarty) to study social class. Published The Social Stratification of Language which ripped Linguistics up. Chomsky was the big swinging dick of Linguistics up to that. Chomsky thought that language was an abstract program stored mainly as syntax in the brain. So he sparked all these omigod-boring studies of Syntax. Let me tell you something about syntax – Fuck Syntax. Labov came out and said no, there’s a huge social influence on language.

These is notes from my SocioLinguistics class Fischer covered 80% of SocioLing in 1958. Before it was mostly Historical Linguistics. Then Structuralism (Saussure). Finally in 1957 Chomsky started Generative Linguistics which in 2001 forced Indrajit Samarajiva to draw Syntax Trees so fuck you Chomsky! Seriously, he’s a douchebag. That shit was pointless and frustrating. Plus [...]

I’m sitting in the computer labs at school. Cause I went to class. Today was SocioLinguistics… what’d we do… drew pictures of the prof on my phone and showed them to Tracy. Charles Boberg, he’s really awesome. Tracy has a definite crush on him. History of Linguistics Historical Linguistics (Boring) Structuralism (started by Saussure, assumes [...]