Fourth floor
Dec. 18th, 2024 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lauradi7dwWilliam Labov died yesterday at age 97
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Labov
His "The Social Stratification of English in New York City" was published less than ten years before I first studied Linguistics, and what I really remember about it was the famous data collection technique of walking into various department stores in NYC to ask for an item that would elicit the answer - "on the 4th floor."
The point was that stores that catered to people from different income levels would yield speakers who pronounced it differently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Labov
His "The Social Stratification of English in New York City" was published less than ten years before I first studied Linguistics, and what I really remember about it was the famous data collection technique of walking into various department stores in NYC to ask for an item that would elicit the answer - "on the 4th floor."
The point was that stores that catered to people from different income levels would yield speakers who pronounced it differently.
