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

Answer the following questions using the book and other sources.

Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?

Milroy says that sound change is the most mysterious change in language, as it appears to have no obvious function or rational motivation.
It is also 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.

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

The 19th Century Neogrammarian movement was based on the idea that changes affect all relevant items in the same way at the same time. Milroy is against these ideas when he says that he does not think that this is a “plausible scenario” for sound change.

The main difference between the approaches of the Neogrammarians and Milroy is that the first group focuses on language as an object, and do not take into consideration the speakers that language. In contrast, Milroy firmly believes in the importance of analysing speech and language in social contexts.

According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on? (149?)

Milroy has an account based on a sociolinguistic approach to the study of language change. This model is different from the others because of its insistence on the methodological priority of the study of language maintenance over the study of language change. It is assumed that a linguistic change is embedded in a context of language (or dialect) maintenance. If a change persists in the system, it has again to be maintained by social acceptance and social pressure.

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

Milroy says that speech “sounds” do not physically change, what happens is that in the course of time one sound is substituted by another.

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

Sound change is a social phenomenon in that it comes about because speakers in conversation bring it about. It isn’t languages that change- it is speakers who change languages. Such a view is obviously a very long distance away from the Neogrammarian notion that sound change is “blind”.

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

Lexical diffusion is a social gradualness process which is gradual, abrupt replacement patterns and can be shown to be regular in some sense and the new form differs markedly. It is compared with “regular” sound change which is also a social gradualness process.

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

Dialect displacement is the displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time. In the text, Milroy refers to the gradual displacement of heavily inflected West Midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected East Midland dialects, which led to morphological simplification of the grammar of English more generally.

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

Norms observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms which manifest themselves at different levels of generality.

We can link the community norms to the wave theory, which implies that a change spreads successively to further contexts and social groups until it is realized in all contexts and with all speakers.

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

Milroy explains that a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without ever going to “completion” in the traditional sense.

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

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. It is speakers, and not languages, that innovate. It should also be noted that innovation, when it happens, must be unstructured and “irregular” and not describable by quantitative or statistical methods. It may be observable.

This distinction between innovation and change has not been sufficiently carefully or consistently observed in historical linguistics, and that man discussions, about linguistic change have been in reality about linguistic innovation.

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)?

Because of the fact that the distinction between true sound change and phonological borrowing is poorly motivated.

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

The spread of the change is by “borrowing” and implied that the spread therefore does not involve sudden replacement- this is said to be “aside from its spread by borrowing”. But in fact, whether we are dealing with some original event or with a concatenation of “borrowing”, each single event is equally abrupt- “a sudden replacement of one trill by another”.

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

From a sociolinguistic perspective, standard languages are not “normal” languages. They are created by the imposition of political and military power, hence, the sound-patterns in them and the changes that come about in these sound patterns do not come about through blind necessity.

Standard languages are carefully constructed in order to appear as if they are discrete linguistic entities- and the ideology of standardization causes people to believe that they are indeed discrete physical entities.

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

When Milroy speaks about “clean” data in the last section of the text, he refers to language that is uniform, unilinear and normalized (idealized). The “dirty” data is the result of sociolinguistic studies, in which language is considered as irregular and chaotic.

Academic year 2008/2009
© Raúl Gisbert Cantó
giscan@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press