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 appers to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?

Milroy say that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or

rational motivation” because in a change from [e:] to [i:], for example (as in such items as meet, need, kenn in the history of English), it is impossible to see any progress or benefit to the language or its speakers - 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 (147-148)?

Milroy says that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation”. It is impossible to see any progress or benefit to the language or its speakers.

Neogrammarians: their basic axiom is that sound change is ‘regular’: sound ‘laws’ have no exceptions. One important Neogrammarian claim is that regular sound change is phonetically gradual but lexically abrupt.

The main difference between the Milroy’s approach and the Neogrammarians’ approach is that Milroy believes in the importance of analysing speech and language in social contexts. But in contrast, the approaches of the Neogrammarians focus on language as an object, and do not take into consideration the speakers.

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

According to Milroy 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.

4. Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?

Milroy says that sound change actually doesn’t exist because speech ‘sounds’ do not physically change: what happens I s that in the course of time one sound is substituted for another. Moreover, historical linguistics actually observed in data from the past is not a sound change, but a ‘diachronic correspondence’ between language states at two or more points in time.

5. Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?

Milroy is disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is ‘blind’ because for Milroy it does not to make sense to say that sound-change is phonetically gradual.

Milroy says that it isn’t languages that change- it is speakers who changes languages. So, for Milroy, sound change is socially gradual: it passes from speaker to speaker and from group to group.

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

Lexical diffusion is a socially gradual process and abrupt replacement patterns. It can be shown to be regular in some sense.

Milroy distinguishes between lexical diffusion and gradual phonetic change.

7. 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.

One example, which Milroy is referring to in the text, is 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.

8. What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar (152)?

The speakers can recognize different dialects of a language and it demonstrates other norms exist apart from the standard ones. These norms are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms, which manifest themselves at different levels of generality. These are ‘community’ or ‘vernacular’ norms.

9. 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. Milroy is saying that 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 although, the practise of ‘h-dropping’ is commonly used.

10. 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. It is speakers, and not languages, that innovate.

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.

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)?

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

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.

13. 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 - whereas dialects and languages that have not been standardized have fuzzy boundaries and are indeterminate.

14. What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?

Milroy refers to language that is unilinear, uniform and normalized (idealized), when he speaks about ‘clean’ data. Whereas, he refers to the result of sociolinguistics studies, in which language is considered as irregular and chaotic, when he speaks about ‘dirty’ data.

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