Love of Labov

Today is the start of NWAV 2011 at Georgetown University. This is my first NWAV and the following is my first experience at the conference:

I stood in front of an older gentleman who sat unassumingly at a table in the conference room I had entered. A glance at his nametag pushed me into action: “Hi, Dr. Labov. I’m Laura West.” “Oh!” he said smiling, generously and gregariously shaking my hand as if it were an honor. “I will be your AV person,” I said proudly. (which means, I will be sitting nervously in the front row praying nothing goes wrong with the audio-visual, because I won't know how to fix it).

For those non-linguists who don’t know William Labov, he’s a rock star. His Master’s thesis created a new field of linguistic study (something none of us even hope to do with our Dissertation): sound change looked at in social context. And this was at a time when he had no access to the friendly technology linguists enjoy today. He mentioned that the early use of sonograph took up to five minutes to measure the vowel formants of a single vowel! And forget using fancy lab equipment for acoustic measurements; back then, a graduate student would have had to come up with $20k for a study using a lab. (Now, linguists have PRAAT, which is both quicker and FREE!)

And now, Labov and friends are developing FAVE (forced alignment & vowel extraction), to save linguists from the hand-coding of formants altogether. Thanks for everything, Labov!!