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 refers to sound change as probably the most mysterious change in language, as it has no obvious function or rational motivation. He then says that certain changes do not benefit the language or its speakers in any way. These changes do not aid the progression of languages either- 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 19^th Century Neogrammarian movement was based on the idea that sound change is regular and therefore, that sound laws have no exceptions. Another important Neogrammarian claim is that regular sound change is phonetically gradual but lexically abrupt; changes affect all relevant items in the same way at the same time. Milroy makes it clear that he 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 sociolinguists like Milroy is the fact that the first group focus on language as an object, and do not take into consideration the speakers of the said language. In contrast, Milroy firmly believes in the importance of analysing speech and language in social contexts. We can also refer to the fact that the Neogrammarians believed that linguistic change is best studied by reference to monolingual states, whereas sociolinguistic research 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.

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

Milroy assumes that language change is embedded in a context of language maintenance. The degree to which the change is admitted will depend on the degree of internal cohesion in 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)?

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 fundamentally social process by which the speakers change their language and for this reason Milroy disagrees with the idea of “blind” sound change.

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

Lexical diffusion is a socially gradual process and abrupt replacement pattern, by which a form changes and the resulting form is markedly different to the original one. Milroy distinguishes between lexical diffusion and gradual phonetic change, where the difference between the two forms is not as obvious.

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. Here, he is referring to the fact that whilst the practise of “h-dropping” is commonly used, it is possible that we will never reach a point in which all of the speakers of the English language consider this usage as normative.

In another article, Milroy presents extensive quantitative evidence showing that it is possible to distinguish different Middle English varieties on the basis of the treatment of word-initial h-, and that it is necessary to postulate that, in some varieties, word-initial h- fails to surface in given contexts, though being present as a consonantal phoneme in the underlying representation. This casts a new light on the old problem of whether word-initial h- was lost in Middle English and restored at a later stage: the data presented here suggest that h- loss was never generalized, though h-less forms did surface as contextual variants of h-ful forms.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=2A8C614BB76DA47FEDFE064EF9AFB606.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=933464#

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. When an innovation is taken up by a speech community, the process involved is fundamentally a borrowing process; therefore, the implantation of a sound change depends on the borrowing of an 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)?

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”, this affirmation leads Milroy to state that the distinction between true sound change and phonological borrowing is poorly motivated.

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

Sound changes have normally observed to spread gradually through the lexicon. The spread of sounds can result from borrowing or a sudden replacement of one trill by another. We must point out that the spreading of sounds is a social process.

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.