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