Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?
Because there have been very few changes in the vowel-sounds for example. There hasn’t been a drastic change, like in the example with the [e:] and [i:].
What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?
The Neogrammarians think that the sound change is “regular” and focus in “sound change” in the narrower sense- how is implemented. Milroy tries to see the speakers as the main reason for language change.
According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on? (149)
Language change depends on the norms of the community, because they seem to be socially conditioned.Milroy says this because sounds do not physically change. During time, one sound is replaced by another.
Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind”(150)?
Because speakers are the ones who change language and it can’t be “blind” because it passes from speaker to speaker and from community to community.
In historical linguistics, lexical diffusion is both a phenomenon and a theory. The phenomenon is that by which a phoneme is modified in a subset of the lexicon, and spreads gradually to other lexical items. For example, in English, /uː/ has changed to /ʊ/ in good and hood but not in food; some dialects have it in hoof and roof but others do not; in flood and blood it happened early enough that the words were affected by the change of /ʊ/ to /ʌ/, which is now no longer productive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_diffusion
What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152) Dialect displacement means displacement of one dialect with 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 interpreted as indicating that much New Zealand English in the nineteenth century was Southern British in type and that an Australasian type with some effects of mixture and residue displaced it.
What are
“community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class
is similar (152)?
Community” or “vernacular” norms
are the
norms that exist apart from the standard ones which are observed and
maintained by speakers and communities.
What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?
He could mean that a sound is not necessary to complete its change, this being one case of this kind of linguistic innovation.
Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected (153)?
An innovation involves automatically the speaker more than the language. The speaker changes the language and not the language alone. The change manifests in the language system. A speaker innovation can happen many times, but it doesn’t necessary involve a change, at least not until it is accepted by all the members of the community.
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 most predictable method for
sound change is the contact between dialects. Bloomfield and the
Neogrammarians think this is not sound-change proper because they
tended equalize sound-change with internal innovation to the dialect
concerned.
For a sound to spread is necessary that the speakers of a community repeat it all along and to all the people they know.
Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?
Because people want to have some norms and rules to follow and to help them to see what is right and what is wrong, although they are conscious about the mistakes they make.‘Clean’ data is data that has already been largely normalized and the data that we find in a social community is to a greater extent ‘dirty’ data.