-What is more
common in language uniformity or variability?
It is more common
in language variability.
-What kinds of
variability exist?
Kinds:
Variability in written language, in speech (conversation). In the past language
was a spoken and not literary phenomenon.
-How do we decide
if a particular group of speakers belong to a particular dialect or language?
Dialect must be
limited to a section of the population which share a special meaning for a word
or expression which only those in a specific area of population, or their
inheritors, will comprehend, whenever or wherever they use the word or
expression. Dialect can be modified and modernised but dialect will not die
until the people who use it wherever they are, cease to exist.
Emigrants from
Scottish: D’ye
huv a fag?
Standard English:
Do you have a cigarette?
Dialect involves
ellipsis, shortened pronunciation and completely different vocabulary.
-Saussure
emphasized the importance of synchronic descriptions of languages rather than
diachronic. He and is disciples (structuralists) focused on language at
different periods as finite entities. Is this reasonable?
Diachronic
description indicates the changes that words may experience “over time”.
For example:
“Gay” in the 19th century of Jane Austen meant “cheerful and happy”,
20th century meaning “homosexual”.
Synchronic description
studies the meaning of language at a particular point in time, without relation
to its evolution through centuries.
For example:
“Squirrel” “ardilla”, geographical point in time. There’s a squirrel in the
tree. “Esquirol”- Catalán 20th century- a worker who refuses to
support his sindicate in a strike.
-The unattested
states of language were seen as transitional stages in which the structure of a
language was, as it were, disturbed. This made linguistic change look abnormal.
Is it abnormal?
The principles of
historical linguistics have been largely based on the study of uniform states
and standard or near standard languages. From a sociolinguistic perspective,
standard languages are not “normal” languages. “The drama of linguistic
change”, according to Wyld (1927: 21), “is enacted not in manuscripts nor
inscriptions, but in the mouths and minds of men”, and historical linguistics
have generally insisted that the history of language is primarily the history
of spoken language.
-Milroy (1992: 3)
says “the equation of uniformity with structuredness or regularity is most
evident in popular (non-professional) attitudes to language: one variety
–usually a standard language – is considered to be correct and regular, and
others –usually ‘non-standard’ dialects – are thought to be incorrect,
irregular, ungrammatical and deviant. Furthermore, linguistic changes in
progress are commonly perceived as ‘errors’. Thus although everyone knows that
language is variable, many people believe that invariance is nonetheless to be
desired, and professional scholars of language have not been immune to the
consequences of these same beliefs.”
A standard
language is usually imposed by social and political standards. In other words,
what is correct and regular would be established by the R.A.E. and would be
spoken by the upper class register who would establish the accepted meaning of
a word within the restricted field of the educated noble classes who accepted
these norms.
-Can you think of
any example of non-professional attitudes to your own language?
I can explain
some non professional attitudes to English, in that an Estuary (
Dropping the
/h/- ‘is an ‘ard man – he is a hard
man.
These
pronunciations should not be despised because they are comprehensible.
Be that as it
may, it must be recognised that people (I would say in power) make definitions
of words and ordinary people accept them.
These language
states are planned by human beings and maintained through prescription (Milroy
and Milroy 1985a).
-Why does Milroy
use “scare quotes” around non-standard and
errors?
Dialects
“non-standard” would be those incomprehensible out with the social and
geographical or “class” ambience of the people who spoke them. This they are
perceived as “errors”.
English “common”
= vulgar. “Cockney”, “Gypsy”,”Scots”…
“Scare quotes” in
the context of non-standard and errors:
Possibly the
worst use of standard acceptable language in the tabloid press, with bad
spelling, wrong use of words and totally mistaken use: your = you’re; if your
thinking…
Tabloid headlines
(to attract attention): “Family Life is in Meltdown” (Daily Mail).
Meltdown: phase
of total destruction and breakdown).
-Are non-standard dialects “incorrect,
irregular, ungrammatical and deviant.”?
Grammatical
standardization is in the norm pretty much fixed. At least in the 20th
century.
Dialects are not
usually standardised because they depend on non-national development, rather
than national acceptable norms, for example invasion of
These days, we
aren’t speaking about non-standard “spoken” dialects, but about the standard
method of communication among young people (more, in fact, that conversation)
the dialect of the sms, where practically every word is either incorrect,
irregular, ungrammatical or deviant. Many of these communicants can’t spell
correctly, and they will forget more and more.
-Which of these
systems is more irregular? Why?
It is more
irregular the first one.
Instead of
remembering third person singular masculine and plural has a root in the
pronoun complement, the easier is repeating the possessive adjective.
|
Myself Yourself Himself Herself Ourselves Themselves |
Myself Yourself Hisself Herself Ourselves Theirselves |
-“… much of the
change generally accepted body of knowledge on which theories of change are based
depends on quite narrow interpretations of written data and econtexutalized
citation forms (whether written or spoken), rather than on observation of
spoken language in context (situated speech). (Milroy 1992: 5) Why do you think
this is so?
It is in spoken,
rather than in written, language that we are able to detect structural and
phonetic changes in their early stages; for this reason and others, our
understanding of the nature of linguistic change can be greatly enhanced by
observing in a systematic way recurrent patterns of spoken language as it is
used around us in day-to-day contexts by live speakers.
-Any description
of a language involves norms? Think
of the descriptions of your own language. Why is this so? For example: He ate the pie already is considered to
be non-standard in which variety of English and perfectly acceptable in which
other?
The word “social”
here does not mean social class or prestige – the decisions (or judgements) we
are talking about are decisions (or judgements) about the “norms” of the
variety concerned, and these norms are social in the sense that they are agreed
on socially- they depend on consensus among speakers within the community or-
communities concerned and will differ from one community to another. The
accuracy of the linguist’s description must therefore be judged on how closely
it coincides with the socially agreed norm for the relevant community.
Most language
description encounters this problem of “norms”, and although it is not always
acknowledged, it can be detected in many descriptive accounts of English. Even
a statement that Received Pronunciation (RP) of English has a long diphthong
with an open first element in such word as tie
and tight depends on observing a
sample of people who are considered to be speaking this variety and on the
linguist’s judgement that this vowel is the majority usage among these persons.
The
interpenetration of social and linguistic judgements is easily demonstrated in
the work of linguists who are ostensibly non social in their approach. Smith
(1989: 111 – 12), for example, comments that “for most speakers of (British)
English’ He ate the pie already is
“barely acceptable”, whereas He has eaten
the pie already is “fine”. It is more or less correct for English in
But is true of
“standard” English norms (as described by Palmer, Trudgill and Smith) is also
true for non-standard norms, no matter how violently deviant they appear to be
prescriptively-inclined observer.
-What is the
difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammars?
Descriptive
grammar gives examples which illustrate a pattern through repetition of
sentences of the same type, based on seen sequences of words.
Prescriptive
grammar establishes rules of order, position, which can be applied to the
majority of sentences before their being created.
-Weinreich, Labov
and Herzog’s (1968) empirical foundations
of language change:
Constraints: what changes are possible and what are not
Embedding: how change
spreads from a central point through a speech community
Evaluation: social responses to language change (prestige overt and covert
attitudes to language, linguistic stereotyping and notions on correctness).
Transition: “the intervening stages which can be observed, or which must be
posited, between any two forms of a language defined for a language community
at different times” Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 101)
Actuation: Why particular
changes take place at a particular time.
The “Empirical
Foundations” are based on the previous experience of all the possible sentences
formed in the past and which will continue in the present and the future. For
example in English: subject / verb / predicate.
-What do you
think the “prestige motivation for
change” and the “solidarity constraint” mean? How are they opposed?
“Prestige”
motivation to adopt RP forms is overridden here by the solidarity constraint,
which requires the speaker to conform to local community norms rather than to
norms that are viewed as “external”.
Sound change:
post-vocalic /r/ in
-Actuation: Why
did /k/ palatalize before certain front vowels? PrsE: cheese, German käse English/Norse
doublets shirt/skirt?
There are, of
course, well-known examples of varying developments of this kind: amongst the
continental Scandinavian languages, Swedish and Norwegian have palatalization
of Old Norse /k/, whereas Danish now usually has a velar; Old English underwent
palatalization before front vowels whereas Old high Germen and Old Norse did
not: hence PresE cheese for German käse an English/ Norse doublets in PresE
such a shirt / skirt; many Hiberno – English dialects (J.Milroy, 1981, and
elsewhere) have [ k ]- palatalization in words of type car, cart, whereas most other English dialects do not. What we
observe here are conflicting patterns of change and stability in languages and
dialects of similar structure.
-What is the
biological metaphor in language change?
According to
Trench (188: 223-4), language has a life “as surely as a man or a tree”.
Müller’s adoption
of the biological metaphor is so strongly stated that for him it does not seem
to have been a metaphor at all: linguistics, according to Müller, is literally
a physical science on a par with
geology, botany and biology, and not a historical
science, such as art, morals or religion. “Physical science”, including
linguistics, “deals with the works of God” whereas “historical science deals
with the works of man” (1861: 22). Language therefore does not have history, it has growth. The metaphor has a weakened since Müller wrote, but there
have been many publications on language history since then that have been based
on the idea of the independent “life” of language. Indeed, the metaphor is by no means dead: this is amply demonstrated
by continued references in recent work to “language birth”, “language death”
and the “roots” of language.
-What is the
difference between internal and external histories of a language?
Possibly as a
result of the emphasis on internal language systems, descriptive accounts (such
as histories of English) commonly separate the internal history of a language
from its external history ( that is, the political, social and attitudinal
contexts of language). Thus, some historical accounts of English, such as Wyld
(1927), have been mainly internal (typically focusing on sound-change and
morphological change), whereas others (such as McKnight, 1928) have been about
the external history of the language, discussing, for example,
speaker-attitudes to variation as they were expressed by seventeenth-and
eighteenth-century commentators. It is commonly believed that the “real”
history of a language is its internal system-based history and that the external
history is relatively unimportant.
-Look up Neogrammarians and lexical diffusion. Why are they often found in the same paragraph
or chapter?
Neogrammarian
exceptionless change is accounted for by post-lexical
rules.
The lexical
diffusion model (Wang, 1960) holds that sound-changes may be lexically gradual:
thus, in a change from /e:/ to /i:/ (such as as the Early modern English)
change in words of the type meat, peace, leave), items are transferred to the
new class at differential rates, often leaving a residue of items that do not
get transferred (in this case such words as great, break, steak). Neogrammarian
theory, however, has generally been interpreted to mean that the relevant class
of items all undergo the change at the same time, that is, that sound-change is
phonetically gradual an lexically sudden.
-Look up social norm-enforcement, childish errors and slips of the tongue. What have they to
do with language change?
In Sturtevant’s Linguistic Change (1971), we find an
emphasis on the idea of social norm-enforcement, childish errors and slips of
the tongue, and (incidentally) a plea for the study of universals of language
change. All this is presented in a framework that distinguishes primary change (compare our idea of speaker-innovation) from secondary change (effectively,
linguistic change as admitted into grammars of language). Thus, a
speaker/system distinction similar to that which we have proposed (J. Milroy
and L. Milroy, 1985b) is considered by Sturtevant, and he attempts to integrate
the two sides of the question. Jespersen’s Language
(1922), which is a better-known book, reads in places like a research proposal
for modern sociolinguistics and language acquisition studies: the possible
causes of change include features of children’s language, sex-differences
(there is a chapter on “The Woman”), taboo and euphemism (unfashionable at the
moment, but unquestionably very important), language contact, and pidgin and
Creole development.