James
Milroy: Some new perspectives on sound change: sociolinguistics and the
Neogrammarians.
146-160.
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
it appears to have no obvious function or rational motivation. For example, in
change from [e:] to [i:] (as in need, keen, meet in the history of
English) it is impossible to see any progress or benefit to the language or its
speakers as the use of one vowel sound rather than another is purely arbitrary:
there is apparently no profit and no loss.
2)
What is/are the main difference/s between
Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?
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. Tor 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.
3)
According to Milroy, what is language change
dependent on? (149?)
Language
change 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 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.
4)
Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?
Because
linguistic change in general is a result of changes in speaker-agreement on the
norms of usage in speech communities and there is plenty of anecdotal
evidence that a whole ‘dialect’ replaces it, leaving only a few traces behind.
5) Why does Milroy
disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind”
(150)?
Because
it isn’t languages that change, it is speakers who change languages and such a
view does not make sense from the perspective of the Neogrammarian notion that
sound change is ‘blind’ to say that sound-change in 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
sociolinguistics attempt to trace by their quantitative methods.
6) What is meant by
“lexical diffusion” (151)?
It’s a
kind of sound change which is socially gradual, abrupt replacement patterns and
can be regular in some sense. In lexical diffusion the new form differs
markedly from the older one.
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. An example can be the gradual displacement of
heavily inflected West Midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected
8)
What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in
class is similar (152)?
They are
norms existing in a language apart from the standard ones. They deal with the
different dialects and these norms are observed by speakers and maintained by
communities often in opposition to standardizing norms. These norms manifest
themselves at different levels of generality. Community norms can be variable
norms in contrast to standard norms, which are invariant.
We have
used in class the term geographical varieties of a language, which refer
to this dialects.
9)
What does Milroy mean when he says that
h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?
That a
change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without
ever reaching the complete change.
10)
Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the
system. How are they connected (153)?
Speaker
innovation is an act of the speaker that must be unstructured and irregular.
Moreover, when we observe the speaker innovation we don’t know if it will lead
to a change because is probably an error or defective usage.
On the
other hand a change is manifested within the language system.
A change
in the system is originated by a speaker innovation. 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.
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)?
Is
difficult to draw the distinction between sound change and borrowing as it relates to gradual and abrupt change.
First, the origin of this abrupt change is equated with the change itself and
second it is assumed that the spread of 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.
12)
What is necessary for a sound to spread (157)?
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.
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 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” (158)?
Standard
languages are not ‘normal’ languages as 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 and they are not wholly explainable by reference to phenomena
internal to the structure of language. These language states are planned by
human beings maintained through prescription. 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- discreetness of languages is not
inherent in the nature of ‘Language’ as a phenomenon.
14)
What does Milroy mean by “clean”
and “dirty” data (158)?
Clean data is information which have been
largely normalized and which are
provided by standard languages while dirty data is information which are
relatively intractable, irregular and chaotic and is provided by vernacular
languages.
