Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no 'obvious function or rational motivation'?
Milroy says that the replacement of vowel sound is 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?
The Neogrammarians preferred to study linguistic change in monolingual states and now Scholars have access to bilingual and multilingual communities so their studies are focalized on localized varieties in regional speech communities.
Neogrammarians main sources of study were written. According to them the sound change is regular. Also they separate the languages from their speakers
According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on?
It is assumed that a linguistic change is embedded in a context of language or dialect maintenance. The degree to which change is admitted will depend on the degree of internal cohesion of the community (the extent 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 persists in the system, it has again to be maintained by social acceptance and social pressure. Change is maintained in the system after it has been accepted.
Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn't exist?
Because speech sounds do not physically change. Speakers during the course of time gradually replace one sound by another.
Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is 'blind'?
Milroy says that it is speakers who change languages. Sound change is a social phenomenon and gradual: it passes from speaker to speaker and from group to group, and it is this social gradualness that sociolinguists attempt to trace by their quantitative methods.
What is meant by 'lexical diffusion'?
Lexical diffusion is a socially gradual process and abrupt replacement pattern (the same as 'regular' sound change) the new form differs markedly from the remaining one (in gradual phonetic change the new form differs only slightly from the older one.)
What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example.
It is the displacement of one dialect by another that is socially dominant at some particular time.
What are 'community' or 'vernacular' norms? What term that we have used in class is similar?
These are the norms of language that are kept and enforced by social pressures. These norms are supposed to be standardizing norms, which are codified and legislated for, and enforced in an impersonal way by the institutions of society. But anyone can recognize different dialects of a language, what demonstrates that other norms exist and are maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms.
In class we have used, and refused, the term 'hablar bien' when referring to speak a language in a standard way.
What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach 'completion'?
This means that there will not be a consensus on deciding whether to drop 'h' or not.
Explain what Milroy means by 'speaker innovation' and change in the system. How are they connected?
Innovation is an act of the speaker, whereas a change is manifested within the language system. When an innovation appears it is not know if it will lead to a change.
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?
All sound change depends on a process of borrowing. Change is negotiated between speakers, a sound change is implemented by being passed/borrowed from speaker to speaker.
What is necessary for a sound to spread?
First of all a big community of speakers is needed. Then a process of borrowing is necessary and also the existence of a weak tie on the phoneme.
Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in 'blindnecessity'?
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, as the Neogrammarians argued, and they are not wholly explainable by reference to phenomena internal to the structure of language. These language states are planned by human beings and maintained through prescription (Milroy and Milroy 1985a). The idea that there are discrete languages that can be treated as if they were physical entities is in itself a consequence of standardization and literacy –discreteness of languages is not inherent in the nature of 'Language' as a phenomenon. 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 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 blindly and independently of socially-based human intervention is, on the face of it, absurd: it is another consequence of believing in the ideology of standardization. Standard languages are not merely the structural entities that linguists have believed them to be: they are also socio-political entities dependent on powerful ideologies which promote 'correctness' and uniformity of usage (it is likely that they are in some senses more regular than non-standard forms, but further empirical research is needed into this). Thus, although regularity of the Neogrammarian kind remains as part of the general picture, it can no longer provide an adequate backdrop for the study of the origins of sound changes in tl1e variable language states that are found in real speech communities.
What does Milroy mean by 'clean' and 'dirty' data?
Standard languages provide 'clean' data which have already been largely normalized,
On the other hand, 'dirty' data is the one that we encounter in the vernaculars and it is
irregular and chaotic.
