JAMES MILROY: SOME NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SOUND CHANGE:
SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND THE NEOGRAMMARIANS. 146-160.
1_Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation (146)?
Because in any sound change it is impossible to see progress or benefit to the language or its speakers. The use of a sound 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)?
Milroy thinks that language must be analyzed within a social context. Meanwhile, the Negrommanians concentrate on language as an object.
They consider that sound change is ‘regular’: sound ‘laws’ have no exceptions. The regularity principle predicts that it should also have changed in the same way in all other relevant items. If there is an apparent exception, this will be accounted for by another regular change.
3_ According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on? (149?)
Language change depends on the community’s degree of internal cohesion (the extent to which it is bound by ‘strong ties’, which resist changes). If a change persists in the system, it has again to be maintained by social acceptance and social pressure; thus 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)?
Because speech ‘sounds’ do not physically change: 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 according to him, languages are not the ones who change –speakers are the ones who change languages.
6_What is meant by “lexical diffusion” (151)?
It is a gradual sound change in which the new form differs markedly from the older one.
7_ What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152)
It happens when one dialect is displaced by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time. E.g.:
Spanish in Valencia in the 60’s displaced Valencian. There is also an evidence from different recordings made around 1860 which indicates that most of New Zealand English in the nineteenth century was southern British type, and that it was displaced by an Australasian 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)?
These are the norms that exist apart from the standard ones. These norms are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms. Community norms can be variable norms – in contrast to standard norms, which are invariable. In class we talked about “prestige motivation for change” and the “solidarity constraint”. In my opinion, these terms can be related to the question above.
9_ What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?
Milroy explains that the change of /h/ dropping can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without ever going to ‘completion’ in the traditional sense. But it will never be considered as normative.
H-dropping is a colloquial term used to describe the "dropping" of initial "h" in words like "house", "heat", and "hangover" in many dialects of English, particularly in England. It is often regarded as a solecism. The same phenomenon occurs in many other languages, such as Serbian, and Late Latin, the ancestor of the modern Romance languages. Interestingly, both French and Spanish acquired new initial [h] in medieval times, but these were later lost in both languages in a "second round" of h-dropping.
http://www.fact-archive.com/encyclopedia/H-dropping
10_ Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected (153)?
According to Milroy, 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. The relation between both is that it must be speakers rather than languages who ‘favor’ the new variants. When we observe a linguistic innovation we do not know if they are going to become changes. For a speaker-innovation to become a change, it must be adopted by some part of the community.
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 (154-6)?
Milroy states that each single new episode of “borrowing” into a new speech could be an innovation from the original episode. The purpose is to find the original innovation in a specific community.
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12_ What is necessary for a sound to spread (157)?
All sound change must be socially conditioned (it needs to be passed from speaker to speaker), and it is the most important fact for sound to be spread. But it is important to remark that it won’t be considered a linguistic change until it is used by more than one person, and assumed by the community.
13_ Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?
Standard languages are created by the imposition of political and military power so changes in them cannot come through “blind necessity”. These language states are planned by human beings. That is not inherent in the nature of ‘language’. The idea of changes coming about blindly and independent from human intervention is clearly absurd.
14_ What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?
Clean data is the one which has already been largely normalized, while Dirty data is irregular and chaotic.