Activities 2

James Milroy: Some new perspectiv

es on sound change: sociolinguistics and the Neogrammarians.

146-160.

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)?

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.

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

The late19^th Century Neogrammarian movement was based on the idea that sound change is regular, that sound laws have no exceptions. Also Neogrammarian were interested in how “sound change” and another important Neogrammarian claim is that regular sound change is phonetically gradual but lexically abrupt

The main difference between Neogrammarians and Milroy is that Neogrammarians are a scholars that separate languages from their speakers and to focus on language as an object , nevertheless and sociolinguistics like Milroy need to deal with speakers.

Another differences is that Neogrammarians think that linguistic change is best studied by reference to monolingual states, and sociolinguistic think that it can be carried out in bilingual and multilingual speech communities and on localized varieties of regional speech communities, in which there are no clearly defined linguistic boundaries.

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

Milroy assumes that language change is embedded in a context of language (or dialect) maintenance. The degree to which the change is admitted will depend on the degree of internal cohesion in the community ( the extend to which it is bound by ‘ strong ties’, which resist change) , and change from outside will be admitted to the extent that there are large numbers of “weak ties” with outsiders. It also follows that if a change persist in the system, it has again to be maintained by social acceptance and social pressure.

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

Speech “sounds” do not physically change: what happens is that in the course of time one sound is substituted for another; speakers of a given dialect gradually and variably begin to use sound X in environments where speakers formerly used sound Y.

Linguistic change in general is a result of changes in speaker-agreement on the norms of usage in speech communities.

5- 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”.

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

The principle of social gradualness supersedes the binary division between “regular” sound change and lexical diffusion that Lavob discusses. Both processes are socially gradual, both are abrupt replacement patterns, and both can be shown to be regular in some sense. The difference between them in terms of phonetic change now becomes one of greater or lesser phonetic distance between State A (before the change) and State B ( after the change ). 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)

Dialect displacement is the displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time.

An example is 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

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

Community and vernacular norms are norms that exist apart from the standard, and these norms are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms. Also, these norms manifest themselves at different levels of generality.

9- 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.

10- 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 an innovation must be unstructured and “irregular” and not describable by quantitative or statistical methods. It is quite clear that this distinction between innovation and change has not bee sufficiently carefully or consistently observed in historical linguistics, and that many discussions about linguistic change have been in reality about linguistic innovation.

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)?

It is possible to argue that each single event of “borrowing” into a new speech community is just as much an innovation as the presumed original event in the “original speech community(and even that some of these events are independent innovations

12- 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”.

13- 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-and the ideology standardization causes people to believe that they are indeed discrete physical entities- whereas dialects and languages that have not been standardized have fuzzy boundaries and are indeterminate. The idea that the sound changes differentiating these well-defined socially-constructed entities must always come about blindy and independently of socially-based human interventionism, on the face of it, absurd: it is another consequence of believing in the ideology of standardization.

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

The “clean” data is uniform, unilinear and normalized, is the standard languages and it is idealized.

The “dirty” data is the result of sociolinguistic investigations, in which presents the language as irregular and chaotic, progress in understanding linguistic change will largely depend on our ability to cope with these “dirty” data and expose the systematicity behind them.