James Milroy
Language Change And Variation
1.
What is more common in language, uniformity or
variability?
Variability, because languages tend to change, they
are never uniform entities.
2.
What kinds of variability exist?
Languages can be observed to vary geographically and
socially, and according to the situational contexts in which they are used.
3.
How do you decide if a particular group of speakers
belong to a particular dialect or language?
There are words and expressions that identify people
as members of a community of speakers. Shibboleth is any distinguishing
practice which is indicative of one’s social or regional origin. It usually
refers to features of language, and particularly to a word whose pronunciation
identifies its speaker as being a member or not of a particular group.
4.
Saussure emphasized the importance of synchronic
descriptions of languages rather than diachronic. He and his disciples
(Structuralists) focused on language at different periods as finite entities.
Is this reasonable?
Synchronic studies focuses on a particular period of
time, while diachronic studies go through the evolution of a language. Milroy
says that language is not like a photograph, it is more like a film, it doesn’t
have stops, and it has continuity. Languages are always going on.
5.
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?
Unattested means we have no records of the language.
6.
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 or 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 in nonetheless to be desired, and professional scholars of language
have not been immune to the consequences of these same beliefs”.
People that don’t study the language,
non-professionals, tend to uniformity more than variability. They have an idea
of correctness, but it doesn’t really exist, because language is changing all
the time. People in general have an idea of a standard. Some people think that
a language would never change.
7.
Can you think of any example of non-professional
attitudes to your own language?
‘Dequeísmo’ is clearly an
error with regards to normative Spanish.
Sloppy Spanish: ‘he dao’,
‘he trabajao’ etc… There is a kind of weakening; this
kind of language would win because of the least effort.
8.
Why does Milroy use ‘scare quotes’ around non-standard
and errors?
Scare quotes refer to things you don’t mean or you
don’t think it’s true. I’m writing this but it’s not my opinion.
9.
Are non-standard dialects ‘incorrect, irregular,
ungrammatical and deviant?
There is no need for a non-standard variety of a
language to be incorrect or ungrammatical this has to be with the idea of
correctness and regularity. Non-standard dialects are just varieties of a
standard language.
10. Which
of these systems is more regular? Why?
|
1.
Myself Yourself Himself Herself Ourselves Themselves |
2.
Myself Yourself Hisself Herself Ourselves Theirselves |
Him and Them
are objective, not possessive. Option 2 is more regular, but it’s non-standard.
Option 1 is irregular. We brainwash ourselves thinking that a standard is
perfect, correct.
11. “…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 econtextualized
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.
12. Any
description of a language involves NORMS? Think of the description 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?
It is not necessary; the description of a language
just says the origin of that language and where it is spoken. The English
language is defined as ‘the language of England, now used in many varieties
throughout the world’. Language descriptions are normative because to be
accurate they have to coincide as closely as possible with the consensus norms
of the community concerned.
13. What
is the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammar?
Descriptive Grammar refers to the structure of a
language as it is actually used by speakers and writers. Prescriptive Grammar
refers to the structure of a language as certain people think it should be
used. Both kinds of grammar are concerned with rules, but in different ways.
Specialists in descriptive grammar (called linguists) study the rules or
patterns that underlie our use of words, phrases, clauses and sentences. On the
other hand, prescriptive grammarians (such as editors and teachers) lay out
rules about what they believe to be the ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ use of
language.
14. Weinreich,
Labov and Herzog’s (1968) ‘empirical foundations’ of language change:
a.
Constraints: what changes are possible and
what are not.
b.
Embedding: how change spreads from a central
point through a speech community.
c.
Evaluation: social responses to language
change (prestige overt and covert attitudes to language, linguistic
stereotyping and notions on correctness).
d.
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).
e.
Actuation: why particular changes take place
at a particular time.
According to Weinreich, Labov and Herzog, the task of
explaining linguistic change is best divided into five parts –the problems of
constraints, embedding, evaluation, transition and actuation. The first three
of these are interrelated and we have tended to treat them as aspects of the
same thing. The problem of the universal constraints on linguistic change would
specify which changes are possible and which are impossible, and predict which
changes would happen in particular circumstances. Although the term
‘constraints’ has often been understood as intra-linguistic, it is obviously
possible to speak also of social constraints on change.
All aspects are said to be both social and linguistic,
but it is the evaluation problem that is most clearly designated as social. It
embraces notions of prestige, attitudes to language, as well as linguistic
stereotyping and notions of correctness.
The problems of evaluation and constraints can be
viewed as constituent parts of the more general problem of explaining the
embedding of linguistic changes in pre-existing states of language and society.
This overlaps conceptually with the transition problem. The graphs and digraphs
of the quantitative paradigm can be interpreted as displaying aspects of the
linguistic embedding of a variable.
Transition is what most historical description has been
about, mapping the transition between state A at one period and state B at a
later one.
The actuation problem is so challenging that
historical linguists do not usually address it directly; a solution to it
implies the capacity to predict, not only what particular change will happen,
but also when and where it will happen.
15. What
do you think the ‘prestige motivation for change’ and the ‘solidarity
constraint’ mean? How are they opposed?
The so-called ‘prestige’ motivation to adopt RP forms
is overridden by the solidarity constraint, which requires the speaker to
conform to local community norms rather than to norms that are viewed as
‘external’.
16. Sound
change: post-vocalic /r/ in New York. The change from long [ā] to
[ō] in some dialects of English.
Linguistic change is to be understood more broadly as
changes in consensus on norms of usage in a speech community. During the
process there will be some disagreement or conflict on norms at some levels in
the community, but if a change is ever ‘completed’, then it will be possible to
say that some community of speakers agrees that what was formerly A is now B,
but this can apply at different levels of generality –from a single
sound-segment up to a language state as a whole. Thus, to take a much more generalized
case than post-vocalic /r/ in New York, if a language state is observed to
become more or less homogeneous within itself in the course of time, then the
trend to greater or lesser homogeneity is itself a pattern of linguistic change
that has to be accounted for in terms of consensus or conflict amongst speakers
within the speech community.
17. Actuation: Why
did /k/ palatalize before certain front vowels? PrsE:
cheese, German käse English/Norse doublets shirt/skirt?
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 German and Old Norse did not: hence PresE
cheese for German käse and English/Norse doublets in PresE
such as shirt/skirt; many Hiberno-English dialects (J Milroy, 1981) have
[k]-palatalization in words of the type car, cart, whereas most other English
dialects do not. In these examples it seems that the proximity of the velar
consonant to a front vowel may be a necessary condition for palatalization, but
as it does not happen in every case, it is not a sufficient condition. It seems
that in cases where the change was adopted the social conditions must have been
favourable.
18. What
is the biological metaphor in language change?
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. Language therefore
does not have history, it has growth. The metaphor has 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. The metaphor has been largely replaced since the nineteenth
century by a new metaphor based on the machine age: language is now more often
seen as a self-contained system, like a working machine.
19. What
is the difference between internal and external histories of language?
Internal history of a language refers to the
historical development of its linguistic features (phonology, morphology,
syntax and lexicon) and semantics. It is contrasted with external history,
which refers to the social and geopolitical history of the language:
migrations, conquests, language contact, and uses of the language in trade,
education, literature, law, liturgy, mass media, etc.
20. Look
up Neogrammarians and Lexical Diffusion. Why are they often found in the same
paragraph or chapter?
The Neogrammarians were a German school of linguists,
originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century
who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change.
According to this hypothesis, a diachronic sound change affects simultaneously
all words in which its environment is met, without exception. The Neogrammarian
hypothesis was the first hypothesis of sound change to attempt to follow the
principle of falsiability according to scientific method. Today this hypothesis
is considered more of a guiding principle than an
exceptionless fact, as numerous examples of lexical diffusion have been
attested.
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. The
related theory, proposed by William Wang in 1969 is that all sound changes
originate in a single word or a small group of words and then spread to other
words with a similar phonological make-up, but may not spread to all words in
which they potentially could apply. The theory of lexical diffusion stands in
contrast to the Neogrammarian hypothesis that a given sound change applies
simultaneously to all words in which its context is found.
21. Look
up ‘social norm-enforcement’, ‘childish errors’ and ‘slips of the tongue’. What
they have to do with language change?
In Sturtevant’s ‘Linguistic Change’ (1917), we find an
emphasis on the idea of social norm-enforcement, childish errors and slips of
the tongue, and a plea for the study of universals of language change. All this
is presented in a framework that distinguishes primary change from secondary
change. The possible causes of change include features of children’s language,
sex-differences, taboo and euphemism, language contact, and Pidgin and Creole
development.