James Milroy: Some new perspectives on sound change: sociolinguistics and the Neogrammarians. 146-160

Answer the following questions using the book or other sources:

1. Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no ‘obvious function or rational motivation’? (146)

Because in a change from [e:] to [i:], for example, 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.

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

The basic characteristic of the late nineteenth-century Neogrammarian movement was that sound change is ‘regular’ and that sound ‘laws’ have no exceptions. Another important Neogrammarian claim is that regular sound change is phonetically gradual but lexically abrupt. According to Bloomfield ‘imperceptible degrees’.

It is also assumed by the Neogrammarians that changes affect relevant items in the same way at the same time: they all start off from [e:] and then all reach [i:]. Milroy does not agree with these claims and this is shown when he says: “I do not think that this a plausible scenario for sound change”.

The most important difference between the approaches of the Neogrammarians and Milroy is that the first one focus on language as an object and that they does not take into account the speakers of the mentioned language and excluding them. Otherwise, Milroy takes into consideration the analysis of the speech and language.

3. According to Milroy what is language change depend on? (149)

According to Milroy a linguistic change is embedded in a context of language maintenance. The degree to which change is admitted will depend on the degree of internal cohesion of the community and change from outside will be admitted to the extent that there are large numbers of weak ties with outsiders.

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

Milroy assumes that speech ‘sounds’ do not physically change but what happens is that in the course of time one sound is substituted for another.

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

Because the sound change is basicly and necessarily a social phenomenon by which the speakers are who change the language.

6. What is meant by ‘lexical diffusion’? (151)

The ‘lexical diffusion’ is a socially gradual process and an abrupt replacement pattern. What we have traditionally called gradual phonetic change differs from ‘lexical diffusion’ in that the new form differs only slightly from the older one, whereas in ‘lexical diffusion’ it differs markedly.

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

The dialect displacement is the displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time. For example, the gradual displacement of heavily inflected West Midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected East Midland dialects.

8. What are the ‘community’ or ‘vernacular’ norms? What term that we have used in class is similar? (152)

We can call community norms or vernacular norms the fact that other norms exist apart from the standard ones, and that these norms are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms.

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

Milroy says that in a paper on h-dropping, a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without going to ‘completion’ in the traditional sense.

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

Milroy explains that the distinction between innovation and change leads to an associated distinction between speaker innovation and linguistic change. The terms innovation and change should reflect a conceptual distinction: an innovation is an act of the speaker, whereas a change is manifested within the language system. Those that innovate are speakers and not languages. There is also an important thing that an innovation must be instructed ‘irregular’ and not describable by quantitative or statistical methods.

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? (154-156)

It is possible to argue that each single event of ‘borrowing’ into a new speech community is just as much innovation as the presumed original event in the original speech community. This claim leads Milroy to say that the distinction between the sound change and the phonological borrowing is poorely motivated.

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

The spread could be considered as a result of the sudden replacement of one sound by another which is very common in British English. For example, the alternation of [t] with the glottal stop.

13. Why does believing in the ideology of standartization lead to believing in ‘blind necessity’? (158)

The idea that there are discrete languages that can be treated as if they were physical entities is in itself a consequence of standartization and literacy. Standard languages are carefully constructed in order to appear as if they are discrete linguistic entities and the ideology of standartization causes people to believe that they are discrete physical entities.

14. What does Milroy means by ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ data? (158)

Milroy refers with ‘clean’ data to the uniform and normalized language. The ‘dirty’ data is the irregular and chaotic language.

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