1-Why does 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, keen 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)?

· In M approach, data-base and methods used to study the data-base are available.

· In M scholars have access to bilingual and multilingual speech communities, in which cross-language patterns can be studied.

These approaches strongly question the principle that linguistic change is best studied by reference to monolingual states, as the Neogrammarians have assumed. It is in the localized variety, rather than in the “language” (English, French, Spanish) that changes in progress are identified in M approach.

In M, speech community researches do not deal with well-defined linguistic entities that can be regarded as uniform, but with highly variable states that do not have clearly defined boundaries.

• For Neogrammarians sound change is basically regular. According to M, sound-change is not phonetically gradual but socially gradual.
• Gradual phonetic change vs lexical diffusion.
• There is no evidence to support the Neogrammarians assumption that in regular sound change all items in the affected set change at the same time.. On the contrary, sound changes have normally been observed to spread gradually through the lexicon.

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

Linguistic change in general is a result of changes in speaker-agreement on the norms of usage in speech communities.

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

Because speech sounds do not physically change: what happens is that in the course of time one sound is substituted for another; speakers of a given dialect gradually and variably begin to use sound X in environments where speakers formerly used sound Y.

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

Because Neogrammarians say that sound change is conditioned only by phonological factors, but linguistic change is brought about by changes in agreement on norms.

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

In gradual phonetic, the new form differs only slighty from the older one, whereas in lexical diffusion it differs markedly.

There are two ends of a continuum, with slight phonetic difference at one end and gross phonetic difference at the other.

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

It is the displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time.

The gradual displacement of heavily inflected West Midland dialects of Middle English

By weakly inflected East Midland dialects. It led to morphological simplification of the grammar of English. Changes from more heterogeneous to more homogeneous states are also patterns of linguistic change.

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

There are other norms that exist apart from the standard ones, and that these norms are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms.

Some of them characterize the dialect as a whole and are recognized by the outsiders as markers of that dialect. (shibboleth). Others may function within the community as markers of internal social differences, for example gender difference.

Community norms can be variable norms in contrast to standard norms which are invariant.

9-What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?

In a solidary group which agrees on a stable variable pattern, a linguistic change in progress will show up as a disturbance of this consensus and sometimes if the direction of the change has not yet been determined, this pattern may seem to be rather inconsistent and unpredictable.

We interpret this kind of pattern as indicating the break-up of consensus norms and on the other hand, when the direction of the change has been more clearly set, there will be a regular social pattern in terms of age, sex, social class and other variables and it is through this, that we will recognize linguistic change in progress. It is to say, a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without finishing the process.

Because the starting point and the end point of the change are not necessarily uniform states.

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, whereas a change is manifested within the language system. It is speakers, and not languages, that innovate. An innovation, when it occurs may be observable, but when observed, it is not known that it will lead to a change and it is probably thought to be an error or defective usage of some kind.

Not all the innovations will lead to a change. The vast majority of them are ephemeral and lead nowhere.

It is clear that for a speaker innovation to become a change, it must be adopted by some community. It must pass from one speaker to others.

The adoption of a linguistic change depends 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)?

Because what Neogrammarians called a change, is what we call speaker innovation and what they have to explain is the phonetic event of abrupt replacement, not the adoption of this replacement by a community.

It is possible that abrupt events can occur without ever having a long-term effect on the speech community. An innovation is not in itself a change.

A linguistic change is a sociolinguistic phenomenon. It comes about for reasons of marking social identity. All sound change depends on a process of borrowing.

When an innovation is taken up by a speech community, the process involved is fundamentally a borrowing process. It is not a linguistic change until it has been adopted by more than one speaker (assumed a social pattern of some kind in a speech community)

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

Prestige and contact between dialects.

13-Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?

Because standard languages are not “normal languages”. They are created by the imposition of political and military power.

These language states are planned by human beings and maintained through prescription. They are the construction of discrete languages that can be treated as if they were physical entities (with very fixed boundaries).

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.

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

Clean data are those data which have already been largely normalized as it occurs in standard languages.

Dirty data are the data we encounter in the speech community of the vernaculars, that are relatively intractable.

Due to the fact that the data-base of sociolinguistic investigations presents itself as irregular and chaotic, progress in understanding linguistic change will largely depend on our ability to cope with these dirty data.