1. Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation”?
Because it seems insignificant within a language change. According to Milroy “the use of one vowel-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?
3. According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on?
Milroy says that language change is identified on localized varieties in regional speech communities rather than on the whole language.
4. Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist?
Linguistic change in general is a result of changes in
speaker-agreement on the norms of usage in speech communities.
What historical linguists actually observe in data from the past, is
not a sound change, but a “diachronic correspondence” between language
states at two or more points in time.
Sound change is not explainable as a wholly linguistic phenomenon.
5. Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind”?
Neogrammarians say that linguistic change is language-internal, independent of speakers and imperceptible; for them, it proceeds with “blind necessity”. Milroy do not agree with that statement because it isn’t languages that change- it is speakers who change languages. Thus, unlike Neogrammarian theory, speakers play an important role in language change.
6. What is meant by “lexical diffusion”?
Lexical diffusion is part of a binary division (lexical diffusion and
“regular” sound change). Lexical diffusion is a socially gradual
process, is an abrupt replacement of patterns and can be shown to be
regular in some sense.
In historical linguistics, lexical
diffusion is both a phenomenon and a theory. The phenomenon is that by
which a phoneme is modified in a subset of the lexicon, and spreads
gradually to other lexical items. For example, in English, /u:/ has changed to /ʊ/ in good and
hood but not in food; some dialects have it in
hoof and roof but others do not; in flood
and blood it happened early enough that the words were
affected by the change of /ʊ/ to /ʌ/, which is now no longer
productive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_diffusion
7. What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example.
Dialect displacement is the displacement of one dialect by another
because is socially dominant at some particular time.
One example could be the displacement of Valenciŕ dialects (apitxat,
meridional, septentrional) by the standard Valenciŕ.
8. What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar?
Language is a normative phenomenon. The norms of languages are
maintained and enforced by social pressures.
We are aware of the fact that standardizing norms are enforced in an
impersonal way by the instructions of society. Nonetheless, we can
recognize different dialects of a language, which demonstrates that
other norms exist apart from the standard ones. This is what we call
“community” or “vernacular” norms, that are observed by speakers and
maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms.
9. What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion”?
He means that in the traditional sense, a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries so it does not achieve “completion”.
10. Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected?
The terms “innovation” and “change” 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 languages, that
innovate.
For a speaker-innovation to become a change, it must be adopted by some
community; 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?
Drawing the distinction between sound change and borrowing, is difficult, but, from a sociolinguistic perspective, 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”.
12. What is necessary for a sound to spread?
Sound changes have normally been observed to spread gradually through
the lexicon.
For a sound to spread is necessary:
Borrowing
A sudden replacement of one trill by another
13. Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity”?
The historical linguistic tradition has itself been greatly
influenced by the consequences of living in a standard language
culture, and this has affected judgements on the implementation and
diffusion of sound change. The main influence is “the ideology of the
standard language”.
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.
The idea that there are discrete languages and can be treated as if
they were physical entities, is in itself a consequence of
standardization and literacy.
14. What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data?
“Clean” data refers to the normalized data that standard languages provide, whereas “dirty” data refers to the relatively intractable vernacular languages, those that we encounter in the speech community.
Academic year 2008/2009
© Laura Tortosa Nieto
lautor2@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press