languagechange

--What is more common in language uniformity or variability?
-   “At any given time language is variable. Languages are never uniform entities.”

--What kinds of variability exist?
-   “They can be observed to vary geographically and socially, and according to the situational contexts in which they are used.”

--How do we decide if a particular group of speakers belong to a particular dialect or language?
-   According to social, historical, geographical, economical and political facts.

--Saussure emphasized the importance of synchronic descriptions of languages rather than diachronic. He and is disciples (structuralists) focused on language at different periods as finite entities. Is this reasonable?
-   Milroy said: “The history of language is a continuous process: it is not a series of stills, but a moving picture.” I think he is right, so what Saussure said is not very reasonable, because if language is in continuous change, we must study it in a diachronic way, not synchronic.

--The unattested states of language were seen as transitional stages in which the structure of a language was, as it were, disturbed. This made linguistic change look abnormal. Is it abnormal?
-   Linguistic change is not abnormal. “No real language state is a perfectly balanced and stable structures, linguistic change is always in progress, and all dialects are transitional dialects.”

--Milroy (1992: 3) says “the equation of uniformity with structuredness or regularity is most evident in popular (non-professional) attitudes to language: one variety –usually a standard language – is considered to be correct and regular, and others –usually ‘non-standard’ dialects – are thought to be incorrect, irregular, ungrammatical and deviant. Furthermore, linguistic changes in progress are commonly perceived as ‘errors’. Thus although everyone knows that language is variable, many people believe that invariance is nonetheless to be desired, and professional scholars of language have not been immune to the consequences of these same beliefs.”

--Can you think of any example of non-professional attitudes to your own language?
-   I speak Spanish and Catalan, and think in Catalan it’s easier to give an example. People distinguish a lot of types of Catalan, some people distinguish them as dialects, but other even think they are different languages, such ‘Valenciano’, ‘Mallorquin’ and ‘Catalan’. Also in Valencian, there are many dialects considered as non-standard, it means, as an error, like the ‘apixat’.

--Why does Milroy use “scare quotes” around non-standard and errors?
-   Because he doesn’t really think that those dialects are non-standard or errors, he does not agree with that assumption.

--Are non-standard dialects “incorrect, irregular, ungrammatical and deviant.”?
-   It depends on how you see it, but I think that, who decides what is standard and what not? Maybe non-standard dialects are just different but not incorrect.

--Which of these systems is more irregular? Why?

-    The first one is more irregular, but it’s the one grammatically correct. The second is not grammatically correct but show the ‘regular’ evolution that the pronouns should have.

--“… much of the change generally accepted body of knowledge on which theories of change are based depends on quite narrow interpretations of written data and econtexutalized citation forms (whether written or spoken), rather than on observation of spoken language in context (situated speech). (Milroy 1992: 5) Why do you think this is so?
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--Any description of a language involves norms? Think of the descriptions of your own language. Why is this so? For example: He ate the pie already is considered to be non-standard in which variety of English and perfectly acceptable in which other?
-    Any description of a language involves norms. Because without norms it would be more complex to understand the same language spoken by a person from another part of the country, just because languages tend to change, and if they are changing constantly with norms, without them, languages will change faster.
“for most speakers of (British) English ‘He ate the pie already’ is ‘barely acceptable’, whereas ‘He has eaten the pie already’ is ‘fine’. Smith said that is more or less correct for English in England and Wales, but more dubiously for all the speakers.

--What is the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammars?
-    According to this webpage (http://grammar.about.com/):
Descriptive grammar (definition #1) refers to the structure of a language as it is actually used by speakers and writers.
Prescriptive grammar (definition #2) refers to the structure of a language as certain people think it should be used.
http://grammar.about.com/od/basicsentencegrammar/a/grammarintro.htm

Prescriptive grammar
A set of norms or rules governing how a language should or should not be used rather than describing the ways in which a language is actually used.
http://grammar.about.com/od/pq/g/prescgramterm.htm

Descriptive grammar
An objective, nonjudgmental description of the grammatical constructions in a language.
http://grammar.about.com/od/d/g/descrgramterm.htm

--Weinreich, Labov and Herzog’s (1968) empirical foundations of language change:

Constraints: what changes are possible and what are not
Embedding: how change spreads from a central point through a speech community
Evaluation: social responses to language change (prestige overt and covert attitudes to language, linguistic stereotyping and notions on correctness).
Transition: “the intervening stages which can be observed, or which must be posited, between any two forms of a language defined for a language community at different times” Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 101)
Actuation: Why particular changes take place at a particular time.

--What do you think the “prestige motivation for change” and the “solidarity constraint” mean? How are they opposed?
-    “the ‘prestige’ motivation to adopt R.P. forms is overridden here by the solidarity constraint, which requires the speaker to conform to local community norms rather than to norms that are viewed as ‘external’.”

Sound change: post-vocalic /r/ in New York/ The change from long āto ōin some dialects of English.

--Actuation: Why did /k/ palatalize before certain front vowels? PrsE: cheese, German käse English/Norse doublets shirt/skirt?
-    Because is easier to diferentiate words.

--What is the biological metaphor in language change?
-    "Is literally physical science on a par with geology, botany and biology, and not a historical sience, such as, art, morals or religion."

--What is the difference between internal and external histories of a language?
-    Internal histories tipically focusesn on sound-change and morphologycal change. External histories discusses speaker-actitudes to variation as they were expressed by seventeenth and eightenth century commentators.

--Look up Neogrammarians and lexical diffusion. Why are they often found in the same paragraph or chapter?
-    Just becouse Milroy talks about lexical difusion, and marks that is the oppoisite to the Neogrammarians theory.

--Look up social norm-enforcement, childish errors and slips of the tongue. What have they to do with language change?
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