Some new perspectives on sound change:
sociolinguistics and the Neogrammarians.
James
Milroy (reprinted from Newcastle
and Durham Working Papers in Linguistics 1: 181-205[1993])
1
Introduction: sociolinguistics and Neogrammarian theory
This
paper is about a very traditional topic –the theory of sound change- and its
purpose is to work towards an account of sound change that is more explicitly sociolinguistic than those that have
been used to date. We have elsewhere been concerned chiefly with the social
class and network (J. Milroy, 1992a: 164-222; Milroy and Milroy, 1992); in this
paper, my main focus is on patterns of language, rather than society. I begin
with some general comments.
Sound
change is probably the most mysterious aspect of change in language, as it
appears to have no obvious function or rational motivation. In a change from
[e:] to [i:], for example (as in such items as meet, need, keen in the history
of English), it is impossible to see any progress or benefit to the language or
its speakers -the use of one vowel- sound rather than another is purely
arbitrary: there is apparently no profit and no loss. Of all the theoretical
questions about language variation that we might wish to address, the question
of sound change seems to me the weightiest, and the greatest challenge to our
powers of explanation.
The
traditional apparatus for dealing with sound change is largely derived from, or
related to, the late nineteenth-century Neogrammarian movement. Their basic
axiom is that sound change is ‘regular’: sound ‘laws’ have no exceptions. Thus,
when a sound is observed to have ‘changed’ in a particular lexical item, the
regularity principle predicts that it should also have changed in the same way
in all other relevant items: for example, items like (general) English hat, cab,
have are believed to undergo same
particular vowel-change (e.g., front-raising, as in New York City: Labov, 1966)
all at the same time. If there is an apparent exception, this will be accounted
for by another regular change.
[…]
The
Neogrammarians were also interested in how ‘sound change’, in the narrower
sense outlined above (i.e., excluding analogy and borrowing), is implemented.
One important Neogrammarian claim is that regular sound change is phonetically
gradual but lexically abrupt. According to Bloomfield (1933), it proceeds by
‘imperceptible degrees’. Thus, the change from Middle English /e:/ to later English /i:/ (in words
of the type meet, need, keen) is assumed not to have been sudden: according to this view,
speakers pronouncing these words did not make a sudden leap across phonetic
space from [e:] to [i:], the change was so slow and
so slight at any given time that it was not noticed by speakers. It is also
assumed to have affected all relevant items in the same way at the same time:
they all start off from [e:] and, after a slow progress, all reach [i:] at the same time. It will be clear in the remainder of
this paper that I do not think that this is a plausible scenario for sound
change. However, we must first notice that aside from their prominence in
recent sociolinguistic discussion (with which I am mainly concerned here) the
Neogrammarian axioms are still very much to the fore in several other branches
of linguistic inquiry.
[…]
Phonetic
gradualness appeared to be a feasible proposition to nineteenth-century
scholars because of their tendency to separate languages from their speakers
and to focus on language as an object –often likening it to a living thing (for
a discussion see Milroy, 1992a, 22-3). When speakers are excluded in this way,
it becomes easy to believe that linguistic change is language-internal,
independent of speakers and imperceptible. For the Neogrammarians it proceeds
‘with blind necessity’ (mit blinder Naturnotwendig). It is obvious that sociolinguistic
approaches, which necessarily deal with speakers, are not very likely to give
support to the idea of ‘blind necessity’, and we shall return to this point in
Section 5, below. First we consider the main general characteristics of the
Neogrammarian axioms.
The
Neogrammarian axioms have at least three characteristics that are worth
noticing here:
1.
They tend to be dichotomous;
2.
They are non-social in character;
3.
Although the Neogrammarians recognized the importance
of listening to present-day dialects their main sources are written.
At various points I shall mention dichotomies relevant
to sound change. It is the third characteristic, above, that I should like to
consider first.
The
Neogrammarians and nineteenth- to early twentieth-century scholars generally
depended on documentary records of (of ten ancient)
languages and could not adequately observe language in the community as we do
today. Thus, patterns of linguistic change that they identified (by using the
comparative method for the most part) consisted of completed or nearly
completed changes in languages that were usually definable as discrete entities
(Sanskrit, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic and so on): they could not identify
change in progress at early stages and in localized varieties (such as New York
City or Belfast). Thus, they did not actually know whether sound change was implemented in a phonetically gradual
manner: phonetic gradualness was a hypothesis. For similar reasons, social
explanations could not be used except in the most generalized ways, and as late
as the mid-twentieth century, American structuralists
were still assuming that social explanations were not usually feasible. Indeed,
quite recently, Lass (1987:34-5) has dismissed ‘external’ (i.e., socially or politically-based)
explanations as inherently unsatisfactory. Thus, the orthodox non-social view
of language change is still very much alive.
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 can 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. Most relevant here, however, is
research on social dialectology following the pattern set by Labov (1966) in
New York City. Studies of this kind do not focus on whole languages, but on
localized varieties in regional speech communities. It is in the localized
variety, rather than in the ‘language’ (English, French, Spanish, etc) that they
identify changes in progress. The contrast with orthodox historical methodology
is quite evident here. In my own work, I have additionally tried to combine
this type of research with a theory of language standardization (following
Haugen, 1966 and others), to which I return in Section 5, below. Amongst other
things I would like to know how changes originating in localized varieties of
the kind studied in the 1960s and 1970s by Labov, Trudgill (1974) and others,
succeed (or do not succeed) in entering supralocal or standard varieties of the
kind studied by the Neogrammarians. In speech community researches, of course,
we are not dealing with well-defined linguistic entities that can be regarded
as uniform, but with highly variable states that do not have clearly defined
boundaries. Much of our effort has been directed towards developing methods of
analyzing and describing these highly variable states. Thus, there are clearly
great differences in data-base and method between Neogrammarian and
sociolinguistic studies of sound change.
[…]
For
these reasons it is quite illuminating to consider what we might have thought
about sound change if recent studies of change in progress had been the first
studies of sound change ever undertaken. Suppose that the Neogrammarians had
never existed and their axioms about sound change had never been proposed, and
suppose also that our knowledge of language change was based entirely on recent
sociolinguistic studies of change in regional non-standard speech communities
would we then consider the Neogrammarian acioms to be
fundamental in our enterprise? If we had never heard of them, would we ever
think of them as primary principles –and would we follow out our argumentation
in the further, that the orthodox framework of argumentation is not capable of
dealing adequately with the phenomena that we actually do observe.
Sociolinguistic
findings have in effect laid the gourndwork of a new
kind of discourse about language change, in which some of the old axioms are no
longer aciomatic and in which the questions that we
ask about sound change are a new set of questions, overlapping with the old
ones but in a different distribution. In this new perspective the question
whether sound change is phonetically gradual or sudden is no longer fundamental.
What is fundamental in
sociolinguistic inquiries is how we define sound change itself and, further,
how we locate a sound change when it is in progress.
[…]
2
Towards a sociolinguistic modeling of language change
My
account here is based on a sociolinguistic approach to the study of language
change that I have been developing over the years in collaboration with Lesley
Milroy (J. and L. Milroy, 1985b; J Milroy, 1992, 1993; L and J Milroy, 1992),
and which was partly motivated in the first place by my own dissatisfaction
with well-known binary distinctions of types of language change (‘blind’ sound
change v borrowing, conditioned v unconditional change, etc). This model is
differentiated from other sociolinguistic models by its insistence on the
methodological priority of the study of language maintenance over the study of language change. It is assumed that a
linguistic change is embedded in a context of language (or dialect) maintenance. The degree to which change
is admitted will depend on the degree of internal cohesion of the community
(the extent to which it is bound by ‘strong ties’, which resist change), 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; thus, we need to explain, not only how communities resist
change, but also how a change is maintained in the system after it has been
accepted.
[…]
2.1
Linguistic change as change in community norms
A
second issue, which constitutes a sub-theme in this paper, is the place of sound change within more general
patterns of language shift and language change. What we have traditionally
called sound changes have usually been represented as taking place at the level
of the classical phonemic segment – for example, the change from [e:] to [i:] in English cited above, in the, words of Bloomfield
(1933): ‘phonemes change’. But we must consider the possibility that sound
change is not actually triggered at this level: a sound change perceived by
observers at the segmental level may be a secondary, and not a primary,
phenomenon: although we can observe it at the micro-level (e.g., as a change
from [e:] to [i:], it may be one of a number of a
low-level manifestations of a change, or a shift, that originates at a more
general level of language use. I have approached this point elsewhere by
proposing that linguistic change in general is a result of changes in
speaker-agreement on the norms of
usage in speech communities (J Milroy, 1992a: 91), 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 (see below for some examples). It
is fairly clear that the much greater access to spoken language that we now
have gives us the opportunity to follow up such questions much more thoroughly
than was possible for earlier scholars, and there is much scope for future
research on this issue, using inter alia instrumental techniques and
benefiting from advances in phonological theory.
3
Sound change in historical linguistics
In
dealing with sound change of the traditional type, the first substantive point
that we need to notice is that there is, in reality, no such thing. Speech
‘sounds’ do not physically change: what happens is that in the course of the
time one sound is substituted for another; speakers of a given dialect
gradually and variably begin to use sound X in environments where speakers
formerly used sound Y. historical linguistic scholars then observe the result
of this essentially social process and apply the term sound change to the phenomenon. As Andersen (1989) points out, what
historical linguists actually observe in data from the past is not a sound
change, but a ‘diachronic correspondence’ between language states at two or
more points in time (formally this is precisely the same thing as a synchronic correspondence between two or
more states of language at the same time). In effect, they use a system-based
term (sound change) for a speaker-based event in time.
[…]
4
Social aspects of sound change
We
now turn to questions which seem to be more fundamental than the question
whether the implementation of sound change is phonetically gradual or not.
Among these questions the meaning of the term ‘sound change’ is crucial. We
have argued elsewhere that it is not explainable as a wholly linguistic
phenomenon: it is also inherently and necessarily a social phenomenon in that
it comes about because speakers in conversation bring it about, speakers often
have very strong feelings about it, and it is manifested in speaker-usage. 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
sociolinguists attempt to trace by their quantitative methods.
It
seems that scholars in the past may sometimes have equated phonetic gradualness
with social gradualness; that is, when they have said that a change is
phonetically gradual, they have ‘really meant’ that it spreads gradually in the
social dimension –from speaker to speaker. On the other hand, as Ohala (1993:
266) points out, many have certainly believed in the imperceptibility of change
– the idea that sound change takes place in phonetic steps that are too small
for the ear to detect. It is surely clear now that this is a mystical view of
change, more appropriate to a belief-system than to a science, for, as Ohala
also points out, we must surely accept that sound change by definition is
implemented in phonetic steps that are large enough to be detected. If this
were not so, we could not detect it in progress, as Labov claims we can, nor
could speakers imitate it. And if it is not detectable why should we call it a
sound change anyway?
The
principle of social gradualness supersedes the binary division between
‘regular’ sound change and lexical diffusion that Labov (1992) discusses. Both
processes are socially gradual, both are abrupt replacement patterns, and both
can be shown to be regular in some sense. The difference between them in terms
of phonetic change now becomes one of greater or lesser phonetic distance
between Stage A (before the change) and State B (after the change). What we
have traditionally called gradual phonetic change differs from lexical
diffusion (following Labov’s account above) in that the new form differs only
slightly from the older one, whereas in lexical diffusion (as studied so far)
it differs markedly. Thus, from this perspective, the two kinds of sound change
are not two opposing types, as Labov
claims. In phonetic terms, they are two ends of a continuum, with slight
phonetic difference at one end and gross phonetic difference at the other.
The
axiomatic distinction between regular sound change and lexical diffusion is
further undermined by the fact that, as my own work and that of other
sociolinguists has amply demonstrated, there is no
evidence to support the Neogrammarian assumption that in regular sound change
all items in the affected set change at the same time. On the contrary, sound
changes have normally been observed to spread gradually through the lexicon. If
we had never heard of the Neogrammarians, it seems very unlikely that we would
now propose these two categories as axiomatic opposites. As sociolinguists we
may now be inclined to propose some sub-divisions of types of sound change
–some new taxonomies- but they will presumably be socially-based and thus quite
different from the traditional taxonomies. But we must be careful not to
propose premature classifications, and I am therefore quite cautious here.
I
shall return below to social processes, but first I would like to observe that
sound-change is not necessarily a unilinear process either, and this becomes
especially clear if we take a socially-or speaker-oriented point of view. It
isn’t just a matter of A becoming B in a
unidirectional way in the course of time. What Le Page and Tabouret-Keller
(1985) have called focusing and discussion and what I have sometimes called
convergence and divergence, are also patterns of change.
4.1
Varying patterns of change
There
are other patterns also: at a sub-phonemic level, sound-change can be
manifested by reduction in the number of allophonic variants (as in outer-city
v inner-city Belfast: J Milroy, 1982) – a trend towards simplification. At much
more general levels there are patterns of dialect displacement –displacement of
one dialect by 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 (favoured by
males), and that it was displaced by an Australasian type (favoured by females)
with some effects of mixing and residue. The gradual displacement of heavily
inflected West Midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected East
Midland dialects is another example (J Milroy, 1992b) – one which led to
morphological simplification of the grammar of English more generally. Changes
from more heterogeneous to more homogeneous states (including the process of
standardization) are also patterns of linguistic change –even though they are
seldom recognized as such in orthodox historical linguistics.
4.2
Changing norms of language
According
to our social view, language is a normative phenomenon. The norms of language
are maintained and enforced by social pressures. It is customary to think of
these norms as standardizing norms –norms that are codified and legislated for,
and enforced in an impersonal way by the institutions of society. But the fact
that we can recognize different dialects of a language 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. It is convenient to call these community
norms or vernacular norms. I have
tried to show (J Milroy, 1992a: 81-4) that these norms manifest themselves at
different levels of generality. Some of them, for example, characterize the dialect
as a whole and are recognized by outsiders as markers of that dialect. Others,
however, are hardly accessible except by quantitative methods and may function
within the community as markers of internal social differences, for example,
gender-difference. We have elsewhere demonstrated stable markers of
gender-difference in the community (L Milroy, 1982; J Milroy, 1981, 1992a), in
which the pattern is maintained over both the generations studied. It follows
from this that the stable speech community is not one in which everyone speaks
the same way, but one in which there is consensus on a pattern of stable
variation. Another way of putting it is to say that Community norms can be
variable norms –in contrast to standard norms, which are invariant.
All
these observations suggest certain important modifications to orthodox views of
the nature of linguistic change, and these ultimately have to do with the
definition of what actually constitutes a sound change, as distinct from
synchronic variation. Just as language stability depends on speaker-agreement
on the (variable) norms of language, so linguistic change is brought about by
changes in agreement on norms. In the solidary group, which agrees on a stable
variation pattern, a linguistic change in progress will show up as a
disturbance of this consensus pattern. Sometimes (when the direction of change
has not yet been determined) this pattern may seem to be rather inconsistent
and unpredictable: in Belfast we found in the outer city a number of patterns which
did not seem to have much consistency to them. We interpret this kind of
pattern as indicating the break-up of consensus norms of the kind we found in
the inner city (see further 1 Milroy, 1992a: 105-109). At other times
–presumably when the direction of change has been more clearly set- there will
be a regular social pattern in terms of age, sex, social class and other social
variables, and it is through this that we will recognize linguistic change in
progress. It should also be noted that the starting point and the end-point of
change are not necessarily uniform states. As I tried to show in a paper on /h/-dropping
(J Milroy, 1983), a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight
centuries without ever going to ‘completion’ in the traditional sense.
4.3
Speaker-innovation and linguistic change
The
distinction between innovation and change leads, as we have seen, to an
associated distinction –the distinction between speaker innovation, on the one
hand, and linguistic change, on the other. We have suggested (Milroy and
Milroy, 1985b) that the terms innovation
and change should reflect a
conceptual distinction: an innovation is an act of the speaker, whereas a
change is manifested within the language system. It is speakers, and not
languages, that innovate. It should also be noted that an innovation, when it
occurs, must be unstructured and ‘irregular’ and not describable by
quantitative or statistical methods. It may be observable, but when observed,
it is not known that it will lead to a change and is probably thought to be an
error or defective usage of some kind (Trudgill, 1986b, discusses such a case
in Norwich – labio-dental /r/). It is also quite
clear that this distinction between innovation and change has not been
sufficiently carefully or consistently observed in historical linguistics, and
that many discussions about linguistic change have been in reality about
linguistic innovation. Indeed, partly as a result of this conceptual confusion,
questions about how linguistic change is implemented have often appealed to
phenomena that have to do with synchronic variability rather than change
itself. The appearance of phonetic gradualness in the data (as discussed above)
is a case in point. From a speaker-based perspective, we can think of sound-change
as moving gradually through a population of speakers, assuming a regular
sociolinguistic pattern, rather than postulating gradual movement within the
language system (e.g., phonetic gradualness). Quantitative statements do not
show how innovations occur; however, they can be interpreted as manifesting the
socially gradual diffusion of
changes. Bloomfield’s account of how change may come about through gradual
favouring of new variants at the expense of older ones is consistent with this
position: ‘Historically, we picture phonetic change as a gradual favoring of
some non-distinctive features and a disfavoring of others (1933: 365)’.
Although he was defending the Neogrammarians, Bloomfield’s position is in
certain respects also consistent with that of lexical diffusionists, as it can
be disputed whether the variants involved must always be ‘non-distinctive’.
Bloomfield’s position does not require an assumption of phonetic gradualness:
it can apply equally well regardless of whether the two phonetic variants
involved are closely similar or grossly different from one another, i.e.,
whether they are represented as resulting from gradual phonetic movement or
from abrupt replacement – it is still a gradual favouring of new variants. But
this gradual favouring is a speaker-based social process, rather than an
intra-linguistic one. It must be speakers rather than languages who ‘favour’
the new variants. I shall return to this point.
It
should also be noted that, although we sometimes say that sound-change can now
be ‘observed’ in progress by sociolinguistic methods, this is a loose
formulation which is not strictly accurate. Locating change in progress depends
on extensive (normally quantitative) analysis of data that has been collected
from a speech community, and the direction and patterning of a change in a
monolingual community cannot usually be reliably determined until much careful
analysis has been carried out. So we don’t just ‘observe’ it in the community.
However, as I have pointed out above and elsewhere (Milroy and Milroy, 1985b),
we cannot successfully observe
innovations either. To put it more precisely, although we can in principle
observe linguistic innovations, we do not know when we observe them whether
they are innovations that will lead to changes. It must be assumed that the
vast majority of innovations are ephemeral and lead nowhere.
It is, however, clear that for a speaker-innovation to become a
change, it 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. It is
appropriate therefore to consider more closely here the effect of our social
approach on another Neo-grammarian dichotomy – the distinction between sound
change and borrowing.
4.4
Innovation, change and ‘borrowing’
The
sound change/borrowing distinction is sometimes formulated as a distinction
between ‘internally’ and ‘externally’ motivated change. This dichotomy has
certainly been prominent in the work of many scholars, and although it is a
well motivated distinction in certain respects (in vocabulary replacement, for
example), it can be problematic at the level of phonological/morphological
structure (for an especially clear discussion of important difficulties see
Dorian, 1993). In sociolinguistic investigations, what we call ‘sound changes’
in progress are of ten traceable to borrowings from neighbouring dialects.
Bloomfield himself, in his defence of the Neogrammarians, cites an example that
happens to show very clearly the difficulty of drawing the distinction between
sound change and borrowing as it relates to gradual and abrupt change.
In
various parts of Europe, for instance, the old tongue-tip trill [r] has been
replaced… by a uvular trill… Aside from its spread by borrowing, the new habit…
could have originated only as a sudden replacement of one trill by another. A
replacement of this sort is surely different from the gradual and imperceptible
alterations of phonetic change (1933: 390).
From
a sociolinguistic perspective, the difficulties with Bloomfield’s assumptions
here are very striking. First, the ‘origin’ of this abrupt change is equated
with the change itself; that is, what Bloomfield calls a change is what I have
called a speaker-innovation, and what has to be explained (in Bloomfield’s
account) is the phonetic event of abrupt replacement, not the adoption of this
replacement by a community. Second, it is assumed that the spread of the change
is by ‘borrowing’ and implied that the spread therefore does not involve sudden
replacement –this is said to be ‘aside from its spread by borrowing’. But in
fact, whether we are dealing with some original event or with a concatenation
of ‘borrowings’, each single event is equally abrupt – ‘a sudden replacement of
one trill by another’. In other words, it is possible to argue that each single
event of ‘borrowing’ into a new speech community is just as much an innovation
as the presumed original event in the ‘original speech community (and even that
some of these events are independent innovations). Furthermore, if we accept
the Bloomfieldian distinction, we may be inclined to believe that we can locate
the ‘original innovation in some specific community (perhaps Parisian French),
when there can be no guarantee at all that this is the original ‘sound change’
–the Urquelle
of all the ‘borrowings’; we cannot be certain that it had not previously been
imported from somewhere else where it was ‘more original’ –and so backwards ad
infinitum with the origin continuously receding and eluding our gasp. In other
words, the distinction on which Bloomfield depends here (true sound change v
phonological borrowing) is poorly motivated.
It is
also possible that abrupt events of the kind envisaged by Bloomfield can occur
without ever having a long-term effect on the speech community. Thus, a
speaker-innovation of uvular [r] may happen again and again without resulting
in a linguistic change in the speech community concerned. An innovation is not in itself a change, and
it is linguistic change, not
innovation, that we are trying to explain.
As I
have noted above, many consonant alternations that have been studied are
manifestly of this sudden replacement type: for example, alternation of
alveolar with dental stops and alternation of dental fricatives with zero in
inner-city Belfast (J Milroy, 1981, etc.). In the work of Trudgill (1974), Mees (1990), Kingsmore (forthcoming) and others, alternation
of [t] with the glottal stop (intervocalically and word-finally) is a
particularly clear example of sudden replacement and a very common one in
British English. In recent years it has been noticed that this ‘glottalling’
(Wells, 1982: 261) is spreading rapidly in British English, and we hope to
investigate this further. The work that has so far been carried out, however,
raises a number of issues about the origin, spread and social correlates of
glottalling that are relevant to the question of speaker-innovation and
linguistic change. Here I can only summarize the main points briefly.
According
to Andersen (1968, cited in Kingsmore, forthcoming), the earliest references to
the glottal stop are from central Scotland in the 1860s, where it was noticed by
Alexander Graham Bell. Subsequently there are references to it in various parts
of England, including the London area in the early 1900s. Therefore, it is
suggested that from an origin in Central Scotland it spread rapidly to
locations in England. This raises some obvious sociolinguistic questions, such
as the following: Why should Central Scotland have the kind of ‘prestige’
required for this rapid spread to England? How could the glottal stop have
become so stereotypical of London and East Anglian English in such a short
time? Additionally, from the perspective of this paper, there are other
questions to be asked. These are: 1. Does the evidence
show that the ‘original’ innovation was in Central Scotland? 2. Does the
evidence show that the glottal stop diffused by borrowing from Central Scotland
to several other places in the period 1860-1900?
The
answer to both of these questions must be no. There is no evidence to support a
positive answer to either. When the phenomenon was noticed in Central Scotland,
it was already a well-established variant that was socially salient. If it had
been at a very early stage of development with no social salience, it would not
have been noticed –not even by such an excellent observer as Bell. Therefore,
the origin of the glottal stop is earlier than 1860. The fact that it is well
established in the Ulster Scots of County Antrim (but does not prove) that it
may even pre-date the Plantation of Ulster in the seventeenth century. Taking
all these matters into account, it seems most unlikely that it spread to other
dialects (including London English) from Central Scots. There may be an
ultimate common origin for the glottal stop in some variety of early Modern
English, or there may be multiple origins. The point of primary innovation and
the speaker-innovator are irrecoverable. However, as I have tried to show here,
drawing a careful distinction between innovation and change makes a great
difference to how we interpret these phenomena.
In
many of the cases discussed (including some aspects of the spread of glottalling
in Modern English), the most immediate explanation for the changes observed is
dialect contact –externally motivated change. For Bloomfield and the
Neogrammarians, this is not sound-change proper: as we have seen they tended to
equate sound-change with innovation internal to de ‘dialect’ concerned. If
Bloomfield’s view is accepted, it follows that much of our sociolinguistic
research has not been about sound change at all, but about the diffusion of
changes through ‘borrowing’. But as I have already pointed out, the logically
prior distinction between speaker-innovation and linguistic change greatly
alters our understanding of this Neogrammarian distinction.
The
main implication of the innovation/change distinction here is that when an
innovation is taken up by a speech community, the process involved is
fundamentally a borrowing process, i.e. the implementation of a sound change
depends on the ‘borrowing’ of an innovation: 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. Indeed, perhaps we need a
stronger requirement: a change is not a change until it has assumed a social
pattern of some kind in a speech community. To put it in another way –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 at all. It is obviously important
to try to explain how spontaneous innovations arise (and much of our
intralinguistic research has been in reality about innovations), but this is
not the central question that we seek to answer, which is: how do we specify
the conditions under which some of these innovations, and not others, are
admitted into linguistic systems as linguistic changes? From this perspective,
a linguistic change is by definition a sociolinguistic phenomenon (it has both
linguistic and social aspects): it comes about four reasons of marking social
identity, stylistic difference and so on. If it does not carry these social
meanings, then it is not a linguistic change. Similarly, if we think in
traditional terms about ‘sound change’ and ‘borrowing’, we must accept that all
sound change depends on a process of borrowing. Change is negotiated between
speakers, who ‘borrow’ new forms from one another.
I
have discussed the innovation/change distinction more fully elsewhere (J
Milroy, 1992a, b). Here, we need to recall that we have to determine whether
and in what manner the innovation (say, a uvular [r]) will feed into the system
as a patterned change. As long as it occurs as a variant, it is possible for it
to feed into the system in this way, but although there are billions of
occasions on which this is possible, it may not happen at all –even when
favourable structural conditions exist in the language. For the change to take
place it is necessary for the social conditions to be favourable. Thus, if we
explain the phonetic and other intralinguistic conditions that lead to this
possible change, we have not thereby explained why this particular change took
place, and not some other change: what we have explained are the linguistic
circumstances that made possible a speaker-innovation. We have not explained
why it entered the linguistic system at some particular time and place and in
particular social circumstances. This, of course, is the actuation problem
itself (why did it happen at this particular time and place, and not at some
other time and place?). This is a problem that is not ever likely to be
completely solved, but our empirical studies of language in speech communities
have certainly enabled us to get considerably closer to it than was previously
possible. From all this, we can reasonably conclude that, in micro-level
studies of sound change, the traditional distinction between ‘regular sound change’
and ‘borrowing’ is otiose, and to apply it at this level simply leads to
confusion.
We
have also tried to specify elsewhere (Milroy and Milroy, 1985b) what the social
conditions for linguistic change are likely to be, arguing that as close social
ties tend to maintain stability, a large number of weak ties must be present
for linguistic changes to be communicated between people. I believe that the
‘weak-tie’ model of change can lead us to more satisfactory accounts of change
in many traditional areas of interest than have been offered to date, for
example in the history of English and in some aspects of Indo-European studies
(and I had these things in mind when I embarked on empirical sociolinguistic
research in the first place). Here my main point is that a linguistic change is
a change in linguistic structure which necessarily has a social distribution.
If it does not manifest such a distribution, it should not be counted as a
linguistic change.
Some
broader perspectives
[…]
It
has become very clear that the historical linguistic tradition has itself been
greatly influenced by the consequences of living in a standard language
culture, and this has affected judgements on the implementation and diffusion
of sound change. The main influence is what I have elsewhere called the ideology of the standard language
(Milroy and Milroy, 1985a). The principles of historical linguistics have been
largely based on the study of uniform states and standard or near-standard
languages. Therefore, changes have frequently been envisaged as originating in
‘languages’ (well-defined entities such as English and French) or in fairly
widely spoken ‘dialects’ (i.e., in linguistic abstractions), rather than in
speech communities.
[…]
From
a sociolinguistic perspective, standard languages are not ‘normal languages’.
They 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, as the
Neogrammarians argued, 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 (Milroy and Milroy, 1985a). 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. Standard languages
are carefully constructed in order to appear as if they are discrete linguistic
entities- and the ideology of standardization causes people to believe that
they are indeed discrete physical entities –whereas dialects and languages that
have not been standardized have fuzzy boundaries and are indeterminate. The
idea that the sound changes differentiating these well-defined socially-constructed
entities mush always come about blindly
and independently of socially-based human intervention is, on the face of it,
absurd: it is another consequence of believing in the ideology of
standardization. Standard languages are not merely the structural entities that
linguists have believed them to be: they are also socio-political entities
dependent on powerful ideologies which promote ‘correctness’ and uniformity of
usage (it is likely that they are in some senses more regular than non-standard
forms, but further empirical research is needed into this). Thus, although
regularity of the Neogrammarian kind remains as part of the general picture, it
can no longer provide an adequate backdrop for the study of the origins of
sound changes in the variable language states that are found in real speech
communities.
Another
reason for this inadequacy is that whereas standard languages (being
idealizations) provide the investigator with relatively ‘clean’ data which have
already been largely normalized, the vernaculars that we actually encounter in
the speech community are relatively intractable: the data we encounter is to a
greater extent ‘dirty’ data. To the extent that the data-base of
sociolinguistic investigations presents itself as irregular and chaotic, progress
in understanding linguistic change will largely depend on our ability to cope
with these ‘dirty’ data and expose the systematicity behind them.