` Labov approaches his object of study with goal of
critiquing the neogrammarian/structuralist dichotomy between an
idealized psychological language and language as spoken and
used.`
The purpose of this critique is to incorporate language as
spoken into theories about language. Without rejecting Chomsky's
project of exploring the intuitions that allow native speakers to
represent themselves linguistically, he points out that it is a
fundamentally non-empirical endeavor and it is the logical
offspring of problems inherent to and antedating structuralism.
In particular, Labov seeks to re-incorporate "performance" into
theories of language. Labov believes that the fact that
performance is highly variable, changing with context as well as
through time cannot be removed from any adequate theory of
language.