milroy.new.perspectives

Answer the following questions using the book and other sources.

Why does Milroy say that sound change appers to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?
Sound change appears to have no obvious function or rational motivation because 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.

What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?
According to Milroy, the Neogrammarians tend to be dichotomous, they are non social in character and recognize the importance of present dialects (in listening way) although they have written sources.

According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on? (149?)
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. Change is maintained in the system after it has been accepted.

Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?
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.

Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?
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.

What is meant by “lexical diffusion” (151)?
What we have traditionally called gradual phonetic change differs from lexical diffusion in that the new from differs only slightly from the older one, wheras the lexical diffusion it differs markedly. They are two ends of a continuum, with slight phonetic difference at one end and gross phonetic difference at the other.

What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152)
It is the 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 Australian type (favoured by females) with some effects of mixing and residue.

What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar (152)?
“Community” or “vernacular” norms are the norms of language that are kept 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 form the standard ones. These norms are observed by speakers and mantained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms.

What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?
He suggests that if the direction of change has not yet been determined the pattern could be unpredictable, and so that the linguistic change is in progress, and in this case never going to “completion”.

Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected (153)?
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. 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.

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)?
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.

What is necessary for a sound to spread (157)?
A big community of speakers. The spread of sounds can result from borrowing (the new habit) or 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. It is assumed that the spread of the change is by “borrowing” and implied that the spread therefore does not involve sudden replacement.

Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?
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 must 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 tl1e variable language states that are found in real speech communities.

What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?

Whereas standard languages provide the investigator woth relatively "clean" data which have already been laergely 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.