James Milroy: Some new perspectives on sound change: sociolinguistics and the Neogrammarians.

146-160.

Answer the following questions using the book and other sources.

-Why does Milroy say that sound change appers to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?

Sound change is probably the most mysterious aspect of change in language, as it appears to have no obvious function or rational motivation. In a change from /e:/ to /i:/, forexample (as in such items as meet, need, keen in the history of English), it is impossible to see any progress or benefit to the language or its speakers – the use of one vowel- sound rather than another is purely arbitrary: there is apparently no profit and no loss.

-What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?

Neogrammarian axioms tend to be dichotomous and they are non-social in character. Although Neogrammarians recognized the importance of listening to present – day dialects their main sources are written.

Present –day sociolinguistic research differs from the Neogrammarian position in a number of fundamental respects. These involve the data-base available for study and the methods used to study the data-base.

What is fundamental in sociolinguistic inquires is how we define sound change itself and, further, how we locate a sound change when it is in progress.

-According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on? (149?)

The degree to which change is admitted will depend on the degree of internal cohesion of the community (the extent to which it is bound by ‘strong ties’, which resist change9, and change from outside will be ad mitted to the extent that there are large numbers of weak ties with outsiders. It also follows that if a change persists in the system, it has again to be maintained by social acceptance and social pressure; thus need to explain, not only how communities resist change, but also how a change is maintained in the system after it has been accepted.

-Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?

Speech “sounds” do not physically change: what happens is that in the course of time one sound is substituted for another; speakers of a given dialect gradually and variably begin to use sound X in environments where speakers formerly used sound Y. Historical linguistic scholars then observe the result of this essentially social process and apply the term sound to the phenomenon.

-Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?

It isn’t languages that change – it is speakers who change languages. Such a view is obviously a very long distance away from Neogrammarian notion that sound change is “blind”. It does not make sense, from this perspective, to stay that sound-change is phonetically gradual either. But it is definitely socially gradual: it passes from speaker to speaker and from group to group, and it is this social gradualness that sociolinguists attempt to trace by their quantitative methods.

-What is meant by “lexical diffusion” (151)?

What we have traditionally called gradual phonetic change differs from lexical diffusion in that the new form differs only slightly from the older one, whereas in lexical diffusion it differs markedly.

-What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152)

There are patterns of dialect displacement- displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time. For example, there is evidence from recordings of persons born around 1860 which can be interpret as indicating that much New Zealand English in the nineteenth century was southern British in type (favoured by males), and that I was displaced by an Australian type (favoured by females) with some effects of mixing and residue. The gradual displacement of heavily inflected West midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected East midland dialects is another example (J. Milroy, 19992b) –one which led to morphological simplification of the grammar of English more generally.

-What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar (152)?

We can recognize different dialects of a language demonstrates that other norms exist apart from the standard ones, and that these norms are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms. It is convenient to call these community norms or vernacular norms. Community norms can be variable norms- in contrast to standard norms, which are invariant.

-What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?

At other times- presumably when the direction of change has been more clearly set- there will be a regular social pattern in terms of age, sex, social class and other social variables, and it is through this that we will recognize linguistic change in progress. It should also be noted that the starting point an the end-point of change are not necessarily uniform states. As I tried to show in a paper on 7h/ - dropping (J.Milroy, 1983), a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without ever going to “completion” in the traditional sense.

-Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected (153)?

An innovation is an act of the speaker, whereas a change is manifested within the language system. It is speakers, and not languages, that innovate.

It is, however, clear that for speaker-innovation to become a change, it must be adopted by some community. It must pass from one speaker to others. Thus, the adoption of a linguistic change depends at the speaker – level on a process of borrowing. It is appropriate therefore to consider more closely here the effect of our social approach on another Neo-grammarian dichotomy- the distinction between sound change and borrowing.

-Why isn’t borrowing from one language to another and the replacement of one sound by another through speaker innovation with a language as radically different as the Neogrammarians posited (154-6)?

The sound change / borrowing distinction is sometimes formulated as a distinction between “internally” and “externally” motivated change. Bloomfield himself, in his defence of the Neogrammarians, cites an example that happens to show very clearly the difficulty of drawing the distinction between sound change and borrowing as it relates to gradual and abrupt change.

It is possible to argue that each single event of “borrowing” into a new speech community is just as much an innovation as the presumed original event in the original speech community.

-What is necessary for a sound to spread (157)?

All sound change is implemented by being passed from speaker to speaker, and it is not a linguistic change until it has been adopted by more than one speaker. A change is not a change until it has assumed a social pattern of so me kind in a speech community.

-Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?

The idea that the sound changes differentiating these well defined socially-constructed entities must always come about blindly and independently of socially-based human invention is, on the face of it, absurd: it is another consequence of believing in the ideology of standardization.

-What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?

Another reason for this inadequacy is that whereas standard languages (being idealizations) provide the investigator with relatively “clean” data which have already been largely normalized, the vernaculars that we actually encounter in the speech community are relatively intractable: the data we encounter is to a greater extent “dirty” data. To the extent that the data – base of sociolinguistic investigations presents itself as irregular and chaotic, progress in understanding linguistic change will largely depend on our ability to cope with these “dirty” data and expose the systematicity behind them.