Labovowels

Do you agree with this review of prof. Labov's atlas [by prof. Canepari (University of Venice)]?

http://venus.unive.it/canipa/pdf/Labovowels.pdf

He says that the shifts in the NorthernAmerican English are not real.

prof Canepari's known for trying to make pronunciation more ''uniform''.
He thinks newscasters accents are the only owns worth considering...


His own (The Pronunciation of English) is very messy and difficult to follow,and sometimes incorrect

http://venus.unive.it/canipa/pdf/HPr_02_English.pdf

He's not saying that they're not real, but rather that Labov's analysis is primarily of stressed syllables, and that such shifts are older in reality than some would make them out to be. While some shifts are definitely quite new, such as the California Vowel Shift, the NCVS dates back to at least the period around the end of WW2, and I myself have heard inklings about the possibility that it is actually older than that.

As for Canepari, though, I really don't pay much attention to him myself, and I do think that the is *too* finegrained and overidealizes things in his analyses. (When I say too finegrained, the matter is that in reality one deals with populations, not individuals, and often speech can differ quite a good bit even within speakers of the same overally dialect, so how can you specify a very finegrained analysis to what really almost certainly involves a good range of actual pronunciations?)

I think that Canepari is a phonetician.
prof. Labov is a sociolinguist and a phonologist.
Canepari should have read it the way it should be:
''Phonological Atlas of North America''

it's not a phonetic atlas, but a phonological one.