James Milroy: Some new perspectives on sound change: sociolinguistics and the Neogrammarians. 140-160.

 

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 is a mysterious aspect of change in language, and sometimes it’s impossible to see any progress to the language. Explain the sound change could be a challenge.

 

2) What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?

- The main differences are the three Neogrammarian’s axioms:

1. They tend to be dichotomous

2. They are non-social in character

3. Neogrammarians recognized the importance of listening to present-day dialects, but their main sources are written.

These approaches 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)?

The change depends on the degree of internal cohesion of the community, and change from outside.         It has to be maintained by social acceptance and social pressure. 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.

 

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

What we have traditionally called sound changes have usually been represented as taking place at the level of the phonemic segment. But we must consider the possibility that sound change is not actually triggered at this level: a sound change perceived by observes at the segmental level may be secondary phenomenon (e.g.: as a change from [e:] to [i:], what we can observe it at the micro-level)

 

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

Milroy disagrees with Neogrammarians because it is obvious that sociolinguistics approaches, which necessarily deal with speakers, are not very likely to give support to the idea of "blind necessity". Dichotomies are relevant to sound change.

 

6) What is meant by “lexical diffusion” (151)?

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. For example, in English, /uː/ has changed to /ʊ/ in good and hood but not in food. 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.

 

7) What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152)

There are some patterns too: at a sub-phonemic level. At much more general levels there are patterns of dialect displacement –displacement of one dialect by another which is 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, and that it was displaced by an Australian type with some effects of mixing and residue.  

 

8) What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar (152)?

The norms of language are maintained and enforced by social pressures. It is customary to think of these norms as standardizing norms. But the fact that we can recognize different dialects of a language demonstrates that other norms exist apart from the standard ones. It is convenient to call these “community norms” or “vernacular norms”. These norms manifest themselves at different levels of generality.

In class we have used the term “regular” or “irregular”.

 

9) What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?

In a paper on /h/ - dropping 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 “speakers innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected (153)?

The distinction between innovation and change leads to an associated distinction –the distinction between speaker innovation, on the one hand, and linguistic change, on the other. The terms innovation and change should reflect a conceptual distinction: and innovation is an act of the speaker, whereas 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 language as radically different as the Neogrammarians posited (154-6)?

 

12) What is necessary for a sound to spread (157)?

 

13) Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?

 

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

A reason for the inadequacy is that whereas standard languages 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. Progress in understanding linguistic change will largely depend on our ability to cope with these ‘dirty’ data and expose the systematicity behind them.

 

 

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Academic year 2008/2009
© Daniela Curadelli
dacu@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press