[6] Labov was a professor in the linguistics department of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and pursued research in sociolinguistics, language change, and dialectology.
[citation needed] After graduating from Harvard, Labov worked as an industrial chemist in his family's business (1949–61) before turning to linguistics.
[9] For his MA thesis (1963) he completed a study of change in the dialect of Martha's Vineyard, which he presented before the Linguistic Society of America.
[11][12] He also pursued research in referential indeterminacy[13] and is noted for his studies of the way ordinary people structure narrative stories of their own lives.
[14][15][16] Several of his classes were service-based, with students going to West Philadelphia to help tutor young children while simultaneously learning linguistics from different dialects such as AAVE.
[18] Among Labov's well-known students are Charles Boberg, Anne H. Charity Hudley, Penelope Eckert, Gregory Guy, Robert A. Leonard, Geoffrey Nunberg, Shana Poplack, and John R. Rickford.
[22] The Franklin Institute awarded Labov the 2013 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, citing him 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".
[2][23] In "Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience", Labov and Joshua Waletzky take a sociolinguistic approach to examine how language works between people.
Labov, Waletzky, &c., set up interviews and documented speech patterns in storytelling, keeping with the ethnographic tradition of tape-recording oral text so it can be referenced exactly.
It claims that any changes in the sounds or the grammar that have come to conscious awareness in a speech community trigger a uniformly negative reaction.
[37] Anna De Fina remarks that [within Labov's model] "the defining property of narrative is temporal sequence, since the order in which the events are presented in the narrative is expected to match the original events as they occurred",[38] which differs from more contemporary notions of storytelling, in which a naturally time-conscious flow includes jumping forward and back in time as mandated by, for example, anxieties felt about futures and their interplay with subsequent decisions.
De Fina and Langellier both note that, though wonderfully descriptive, Labov's model is nevertheless difficult to code, thus potentially limited in application/practice.
[39] De Fina also agrees with Langellier that Labov's model ignores the complex and often quite relevant subject of intertextuality in narrative.
"[52] In 2013, Universitat Pompeu Fabra awarded Labov an honorary doctorate for "his brilliant teaching and research track record and for being one of the leading figures in the field of linguistics, founder of variationist and quantitative sociolinguistics".