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)?
-    “It appears to have no “obvious functional or rational motivation” because in most change sounds it is impossible to see any progress or benefit to the language or its speakers –the use of vowel- sound rather than another is purely arbitrary: there is apparently no profit and no loss. For example, the change from [e:] to [i:] in words like: meet, need and keen.”

--What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?
-    “Neogrammarians basic axiom is that sound change is ‘regular’: sounds ‘laws’ have no exceptions; if there is an apparent exception, this will be accounted for by another regular change. Another important Noegrammarian claim is that regular sound change is phonetically gradual but lexically abrupt.”
J. Milroy seems not to agree very much with that approach.

--According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on (149?)?
-    “The degree to which change is admitted will depend on the degree of internal cohesion of the community, and change from outside will be admitted to the extent that there are large numbers of weak ties with outsiders.”

--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.”

--Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?
-    Because Milroy does not think sound change is blind as Noegrammarians do, he thinks that “It isn’t languages that change, it’s speakers who change languages.” Milroy see sound change as something “socially gradual: it passes from speaker to speaker and from group to group.”

--What is meant by “lexical diffusion” (151)?
-    Like sound change, “both processes are socially gradual, both are abrupt replacement patterns, and both can be shown to be regular in some sense. 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.”

--What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152)
-    “Displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time.”

--What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar (152)?
-    “The fact that we can recognize different dialects of a language demonstrates that other norms exist apart from the standard ones, and that these norms are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms.” These are “community” or “vernacular” norms.

--What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach
“completion” (153)?
-    “A change can persist as a variable stale for seven or eight countries 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 language, that innovate.”

--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).”

--What is necessary for a sound to spread (157)?
-    The sound moves gradually through the people of speakers by a process of borrowing that permits the sound to spread.

--Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?
-    “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- whereas dialects and languages that had not been standardized have fuzzy boundaries and are indeterminate. The idea of the sound changes differentiating these well-defined socially-constructed entities must always come about blindly and independently of socially-based human intervention is absurd: it’s the consequence of believing in the ideology of standardization.”

--What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?
-    “… relatively clean data which have already been largely normalized…” it refers to the language. Clean data is a language which has already been normalized.
“To the extent that the data-base of sociolinguistic investigations presents itself 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.” So dirty data is just the opposite; a language which has not been normalized and is irregular.

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