JAMES MILROY, Some new perspectives on sound change.
Answer the following questions using the book and other sources.
1. Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?
Because he says it’s “the most mysterious aspect of change in language”; the changes are punctual and also difficult to recognise, don’t follow any pattern.
2. What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?
The main difference that Milroy outlines is that the Neogrammarians couldn’t identify changes in progress (in actual dialects) because they base their patterns in discrete languages (Gothic, Sanskrit…) that, couldn’t support a ‘phonetic gradualness’.
3. According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on? (149?)
For Milroy, the change depends more in the localized varieties rather than in whole languages as English or Spanish.
4. Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?
Milroy thinks that ‘speech sounds’ don’t change, one sound substitutes another in the course of time.
5. Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?
Because he thinks that speakers necessarily deal with sociolinguistics. The sound change is a social process where the speakers change their way of speaking.
6. What is meant by “lexical diffusion” (151)?
It’s a socially gradual process, is abrupt replacement pattern and in some cases can be shown to be regular.
7. What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152)
Is “the displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time”,
8. What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar (152)?
We use to think there are norms that try to standardize the language, but there are other norms in opposition which “are observed by speakers and maintained by communities” (community or vernacular norms).
9. What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?
He wants to say that it’s very difficult that all speakers consider h-dropping as normative.
10. Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected (153)?
Innovation is an act of the speaker, it’s who innovate, and “a change is manifested within the language system”.
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)?
There isn’t a clearly distinction between sound change and a phonological borrowing.
12. What is necessary for a sound to spread (157)?
Sound changes have normally to spread gradually; and it’s also a social process.
13. Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?
Because standardization establishes patterns that lead to believe in “blind necessity”, what isn’t very ‘normal’ in a community language.
When Milroy speaks about ‘clean’ data at the end, he refers that language is uniform and normalized. The ‘dirty’ data is the result of sociolinguistics, where language is not considered as above.