answers_milroy

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.