JAMES MILROY: Some new perspectivas on sound change:sociolinguistics and the Neogrammarians.

1. why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or racional motivation”?

because of the sound change is probably the most mysterious aspect of change in language. For example: in the change from [e:] to [i:] is imposible to see any progress or Benedit to the language or its speakers, the use of one vowel, sound rather than another 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?

One of the differences between Milroy and the Neogrammarians is that the Neogrammarians based their axiom on the sound change is regular;sound laws have no exceptions. When a sound is observed to have a change in a particular lexical item, the regularity principle predicts that it should also have change in the same way in all other relevant ítems.

One important Neogrammarian claim is that regular sound change is phonetically gradual but lexically abrupt. According to Bloomfield, it proceeds by “imperceptible negrees”. Speakers pronouncing these words did not make a suden leap across phonetic space from [e:] to [i:], the change was so show and so Light at any given time that it was not noticed by speakers; so, the main difference between the Neogrammarians and Milroy is that he focus on the importance of the analysing speech and language in social context.

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

the sociolinguistic approach to the study of language change that Milroy developed over the years is differentiated from other sociolinguistic models by its insistente on the methodological priority of the study of language maintenance over the study of language change. It is assumed that the linguistic change is embedded in a context of language maintenance (or dialect).

4. Why does Milroy say that sound chande actually doesn´t exist?

Because Milroy says that speech “sounds” do not physically change: what happens is that in the course of time one sound is substituted for another.

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

Milroy says that sound change is a social phenomenon in that it comes about because speakers in conversation bring about, speakers often have very strong feelings about it, and it is manifested in speaker usage.

6. What is meant by “lexical ítems”?

The principle of social gradualness supersedes the binary division between “regular” sound change and lexical difusión that Labor (1992) discusses. Both processes are socially gradual, both are abrupt replacement patterns, and both can be shown to be regular in some sense. The difference between them in terms of phonetic change now becomes one of greater or lesser phonetic distance between State A(before the change) and State B (after the change).

7. What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example.

It is when a whole “dialect” can die out as another “dialect” replaces it, leaving only a few traces behind it. This is a result of changes in speaker-agreement on the norms of usage in speech communities. For example, Milroy refers to West Midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected East Midland dialects.

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

to deal with our social view in which language is a normative phenomenon. The norms of language are maintained and enforced by social pressures. It is customary to think of these norms as standardizing norms. But the fact that we can recognize different dialects of a language 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. It is called community norms or venacular norms, that these norms manifest themselves at different levels of generality. One example of internal social differences; gender- difference.

9. What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion”?

There will be a regular social pattern in terms of age, sex, social class and other social variables and we will recognize linguistic change in progress, so in h-dropping a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centurias without ever going to completion in the traditional sense.

10. Explain what Milroy jeans by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected?

The distinction between innovation and change leads to an associated distinction – the distinction between speaker innovation, on the one hand, and linguistic change, on the other. 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. It should also be noted that an innovation, when it occurs, must be unstructured and “irregular” and not describable by quantitative or statistical methods

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?

Because 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?

It is assumed that the spread of the change is by borrowing and implied that the spread by borrowing; in other words, it is posible 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.

13. Why does believing in the ideology of standarization lead to believing in “blind necessity”?

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.

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

Clean data have already been largely normalized and the vernaculars that we actually encounter in the speech community are relatively intractable: the data we encounter is to a greater extent dirty data that presents itself as irregular and chaotic progress in understanding linguistic change will largely depend on our ability to cope with these ‘dirty’ data expose the systematic behind them.