James
Milroy: Some new perspectives on sound change: sociolinguistics and the
Neogrammarians.
146-160.
Answer the following questions using the book and other sources.
1. - Why does Milroy say that
sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation”
(146)?
Because sound change is probably the most mysterious of change in
language, as it appears to have no obvious function or rational motivation. For
example, in a change from [e:] to [i:] is impossible
to see any progress or benefit to the language or its speakers sound rather
than another is purely arbitrary: there is apparently no profit and no loss.
2.-What is/are the main
difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians
(147-148)?
Present-day sociolinguistic research differs from the Neogrammarian position in a number of fundamental respects.
These involve the data-base available for study and the methods used to study
the data-base. For example, scholars now have access to bilingual and
multilingual speech communities, in which cross-language patterns of variation
ca be studied. These approaches strongly question the principle that linguistic
change is best studied by reference to monolingual states, as the Neogrammarians and others have assumed.
3.-According to Milroy, what
is language change dependent on? (149?)
Language change 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. It also follows that if a change persists in the system, it has
again to be maintained by social
acceptance and social pressure.
4.-Why does Milroy say that
sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?
Because linguistic change in general is a result of changes in
speaker-agreement on the norms of
usage in speech communities, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that a
whole “dialect” can die out as another “dialect” replaces it, leaving only a
few traces behind.
5.-Why does Milroy disagree
with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?
It isn’t languages that change; it is speakers who change languages.
Such a view is obviously a very long distance away from the Neogrammarian
notion that sound change is “blind”. It does not make sense, from this
perspective, to say that sound-change is phonetically gradual either. But it is
definitely socially gradual: it passes from speaker to speaker and from group
to group, and it is this social gradualness
that sociolinguistics attempt to trace by their quantitative methods.
6.-What is meant by “lexical
diffusion” (151)?
It’s a kind of sound change which process is socially gradual, abrupt
replacement patterns and can be shown to be regular in some sense. In lexical
diffusion the new form differs markedly from the older one.
7.-What does dialect
displacement mean? Give an example. (152)
It is a displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some
reason, socially dominant at some particular time.
An example which is led to morphological simplification of the grammar
English more generally can be the gradual displacement of heavily inflected
West Midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected
8.-What are “community” or
“vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar (152)?
They are different dialects of a language that 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 norms manifest themselves at different levels of generality.
We have used in class the term geographical dialects, historical
dialects…
9.-What does Milroy mean when
he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?
Milroy means that a change can persist as a variable state for seven or
eight centuries without ever reaching the complete change.
10.-Explain what Milroy means
by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected (153)?
An innovation is an act of the speaker that must be unstructured and
irregular. If we observe the speaker innovation, we don’t know if it will lead
to a change because is probably an error or defective usage.
On the other hand, a change is manifested within the language system.
A speaker innovation to become a change must be adopted by some
community. It must pass from one speaker to others. Thus, the adoption, of a
linguistic change depends at the speaker-level on a process of borrowing.
11.-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’s difficult to draw a distinction between sound change and borrowing
as it relates to gradual and abrupt change.
First, the “origin” of this abrupt change is equated with the change
itself.
And second it is assumed that the spread of change is by borrowing and
implied that the spread therefore does not involve sudden replacement, this is to
be “aside from its spread by borrowing”.
12.-What is necessary for a
sound to spread (157)?
All sound change is implemented by being passed from speaker to speaker
and it is not a linguistic change until it has been adopted by more than one
speaker.
All sound change must be socially conditioned, simply because those
so-called changes that arise spontaneously are not actually changes: they are
innovations, and they do not become changes until they have assumed a social
pattern in the community.
13.-Why does believing in the
ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?
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 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. 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.
14.-What
does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?
Clean data is information that
has already been largely normalized and is provided by standard languages.
Dirty data is relatively
intractable information and it’s also irregular and chaotic.