` 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.