MILROY TEXT QUESTIONS

Why does Milroy say that sound change appers to have no “obvious function or rational motivation”?

What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians?

According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on?

It depends on the social agreement of a sound change. 

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

Sounds don’t change but are replaced for others.

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

Because he suggests that it’s speakers who change languages and not the other way round, as deffended by the Neogrammarians. 

What is meant by “lexical diffusion”?

The social diffusion of new elements or changes in the lexicon of a language.

What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example.

Quoting from the text: “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?

Those are rules that are left out of the standartitzation norms.

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

He says that considering the fact that h-dropping change was recorded already eight centuries ago and that it hasn’t been accepted yet, it may as well not happen.

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

The changes in the system are led by speaker innovations.

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?

Milroy says that the process of a community of speakers accepting the replacement of one sound by another through speaker innovation is based on a borrowing in the speaker level. The innovation spreads through the borrowing from one speaker to another.

What is necessary for a sound to spread?

To have social connotations, so they can be used to identify social patterns.

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

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

Clean data would be the result of the investigation of standarized speaking communities while dirty data would be the information about the vernacular speaking communities.