History of the English language:
Activity 1: James Milroy: some new perspectives on
sound
change: sociolinguistics and the Neogrammarians= . 146-160.
Answers:
1.-J.Milroy says that sound change appears to have no
“obvious function or rational motivation”<= span class=3DGramE>,because it generates “ no profit or loss” either
for the
speakers of that language or for the language in itself.
2-The main differences between J. Milroy and the
Neogrammarians’ approaches are that the latter =
work on
the premise that language “ behavesR=
21; by itself in a certain way, without taking into account the social
aspects
of language; from Milroy’s point of view, language is mostly a social
phenomenon that has to be observed through spoken data contrarily to
the Neogrammarians whose main data is written.=
3-According to J. Milroy language change is
dependent on
speaker agreement.
4-Sound change doesn’t exist for Mil= roy because sounds do not change physically: they
substitute one another during= the course of time.
5-Milroy disagrees with the Neogram=
marians because he
believes
that sound change does not occur through actual physical transformation
from
within the language itself but through speaker- based c= hanges.
6-“Lexical diffusion”answer in process
7-Dialect displacement stands for the replacement of
one dialect
for another more dominant variety.eg:
8-Community or vernacular norms are ways of speaking
that
differ from the standard norms of a language.
The term used in class was:”geographical
variability”
9-Milroy may mean that h-dropping may not be a cons=
tant through the language spoken by all communities
in
England and therefore it = is a sound change that may not be realized
to the
point of becoming a norm of standard English
therefore
not reaching “completion”.
10-Milroy defines speaker innovation is a change
broug= ht about without method in language: it is a
speaker
–based variety of that language and therefore “unstructured and
irregular”;
speaker innovation becomes linguistic change when it is adopted by a
community.
11-
12- A sound spreads firstly by the speakers of a
language,
who borrow it and use it until it becomes one of the distinguishing
feature= s
of that language; it can then become part of the norm depending on
social
conditions.
13-Because standardization relies on the assumption
that
language evolution is dictated by a set of well defined social
structures in
which it assumes changes that do not depend on human
intervention.
14-“Clean data”, refers to data that has suffered the
standardization process and is used as an example of the norm. “Dirty
data”
mainly refers to vernaculars or geographical variations that have not
been
studied yet .