James Milroy
Some New Perspectives On Sound Change:
Sociolinguistics And The Neogrammarians
1.
What does Milroy say that sound change appears to have
‘no obvious function or rational motivation’?
Milroy points out that sound change is probably the most
mysterious aspect of change in language, that is the reason for him to say that
sound change appears to have no obvious function or rational motivation. The
use of one vowel-sound rather than another is purely arbitrary; there is
apparently no profit and no loss, so it is impossible to see any progress in
the language.
2.
What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s
approach and that of the Neogrammarians?
Milroy believes that language change is external
because it arbitrarily changes due to the speaker’s change in its use. On the
other hand, according to the Neogrammarians language change is something
related to internal factors of the language, meaning that they would have to
separate language from its speakers and focus on it as an object.
3.
According to Milroy, what is language change dependent
on?
Milroy states that language change depends on the
degree of internal cohesion of the community, the extent to which it is bound
by ‘strong ties’, which resist change.
4.
Why does Milroy say that sound change language
actually doesn’t exist?
Milroy declares that speech sounds do not physically
change, what happens is that speakers of a given dialect substituted one sound
used before, for another different. That is, a gradually and variably change in
the course of time.
5.
Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when
they say that sound change is ‘blind’?
Some scholars in the past had made equal phonetic
gradualness and social gradualness, when they said that a change is
phonetically gradual they really meant that change spreads from speaker to
speaker, gradually in the social dimension. On the other hand, many others have
believed in the imperceptibility of change, the idea that sound change takes
place in very small phonetic steps which are really difficult to detect.
6.
What is meant by ‘lexical diffusion’?
Lexical diffusion is a socially gradual process and an
abrupt replacement pattern, which can be shown to be regular in some sense. In
terms of phonetic change, the distance between the State before the change and
the State after it differs markedly.
7.
What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example.
It means the displacement of one dialect by another
which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time. An
example is the gradual displacement of heavily infected West Midland dialects
of Middle English by weakly infected East Midland dialects, which led to
morphological simplification of the grammar of English more generally. (J
Milroy, 1992b)
8.
What are ‘community’ or ‘vernacular’ norms? What term
that we have used in class is similar?
These norms are observed by speakers and maintained by
communities often in opposition to standardizing norms. These norms manifest
themselves as a whole and are recognized by outsiders as markers of that
dialect. Others are hardly accessible except by quantitative methods and may
function within the community as markers of internal social differences, for
example, gender differences.
Shibboleth is a word which distinguishes a person as a
member of a linguistic group, e.g. the use in Argentina of the word ‘vos’ to refer to ‘you’.
9.
What does Milroy mean when he says that h- dropping
may not ever reach ‘completion’?
He means that the starting point and the end point of
change are not necessarily uniform states. A change can persist as a variable
state for seven or eight centuries without ever going to ‘completion’ in the
traditional sense.
10. Explain
what Milroy means by ‘speaker innovation’ and change in the system. How are
they connected?
An innovation is an act of the speaker, it must be
unstructured and ‘irregular’ and not describable by quantitative or statistical
methods. However, 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?
Sound change and borrowing distinction is sometimes
formulated as a distinction between ‘internally’ and ‘externally’ motivated
change. Although it is a well motivated distinction in certain respects, it can
be problematic at the level of phonological and morphological structure.
12. What
is necessary for a sound to spread?
When an innovation is taken up by a speech community, the
process involved is fundamentally a borrowing process. All sound change is
implemented by being passed from speaker to speaker; it must be socially
conditioned, because those changes that arise spontaneously 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’?
Standard languages are not ‘normal’ languages. They
are created by the imposition of political and military power. 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 (Milroy and Milroy, 1985a). The idea that sound changes differentiating
these well-defined socially constructed entities must always come about blindly
and independently of socially-based human intervention is another consequence
of believing in the ideology of standardization.
14. What
does Milroy mean by ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ data?
The vernaculars that we actually encounter in the
speech community are relatively intractable, because the data we come across is
to a greater extent ‘dirty’data, whereas standard
languages provide the investigator with relatively ‘clean’ data which have
already been largely normalized.