Milroy Questions.
1. - Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to
have no “obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?
Because
sound change is probably the most irregular process of change in language. For
example, in a change from [e:] to [i:] is impossible
to see any progress or benefit to the language or its speakers sound rather
than another is purely arbitrary: there is apparently no profit and no loss.
2.-What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s
approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?
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. For example,
scholars now have access to bilingual and multilingual speech communities, in
which cross-language patterns of variation ca be
studied. These approaches strongly question the principle that linguistic
change is best studied by reference to monolingual states, as the Neogrammarians and others have assumed.
3.-According to Milroy, what is language change
dependent on? (149?)
Language
change will depend on the degree of internal cohesion of the community and
change from outside will be admitted 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.
4.-Why does Milroy say that sound change actually
doesn’t exist (150)?
Because
linguistic change in general is a result of changes in speaker-agreement on the
norms of usage in speech communities,
and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that a whole “dialect” can die out as
another “dialect” replaces it, leaving only a few traces behind.
5.-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 the Neogrammarian
notion that sound change is “blind”. It does not make sense, from this
perspective, to say 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 sociolinguistics attempt to trace by their quantitative methods.
6.-What is meant by “lexical diffusion” (151)?
It’s a kind
of sound change which process is socially gradual, abrupt replacement patterns
and can be shown to be regular in some sense. In lexical diffusion the new form
differs markedly from the older one.
7.-What does dialect displacement mean? Give an
example. (152)
It is a
displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some reason, socially
dominant at some particular time.
An example
which is led to morphological simplification of the grammar English more
generally can be the gradual displacement of heavily inflected West Midland
dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected
8.-What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What
term that we have used in class is similar (152)?
They are
different dialects of a language that 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. These
norms manifest themselves at different levels of generality.
We have used
in class the term geographical dialects, historical dialects…
9.-What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping
may not ever reach “completion” (153)?
Milroy means
that a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries
without ever reaching the complete change.
10.-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 that must be unstructured and irregular. If
we observe the speaker innovation, we don’t know if it will lead to a change
because is probably an error or defective usage.
On the other
hand, a change is manifested within the language system.
A speaker
innovation to become a change 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.
11.-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)?
It’s
difficult to draw a distinction between sound change and borrowing as it
relates to gradual and abrupt change.
First, the
“origin” of this abrupt change is equated with the change itself.
And second
it is assumed that the spread of change is by borrowing and implied that the
spread therefore does not involve sudden replacement, this is to be “aside from
its spread by borrowing”.
12.-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.
All sound
change must be socially conditioned, simply because those so-called changes
that arise spontaneously are not actually changes: they are innovations, and
they do not become changes until they have assumed a social pattern in the
community.
13.-Why does believing in the ideology of
standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?
Standard languages are created by
the imposition of political and military power; hence the sound-patterns in
them and the changes that come about in these sound patterns do not come about
through blind necessity and they are not wholly explainable by reference to
phenomena internal to the structure of language. These language states are
planned by human beings and maintained through prescription. The idea that
there are discrete languages that can be treated as if they were physical
entities is in itself a consequence of standardization and literacy
(discreteness of languages is not inherent in the nature of “Language” as a
phenomenon.
14.-What
does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?
Clean data is information that has
already been largely normalized and is provided by standard languages.
Dirty data is relatively intractable
information and it’s also irregular and chaotic.