Some new prespectives on sound change: sociolinguistics and the Neogrammarians
Answer the following questions using the book and other resources
Why does Milroy say that sound change appers to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?
Because it appears to have no obvious function or rational motivation, it is impossible to see any progress or benefit to the language or its speakers, the sound rather than other is purley arbitary, thre is apparently no profit and no loss.
What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?
Milroy affirms that sound change is probably the most mysterious aspect of the language, as it appears to have no obvious function or rational motivation
Additionally, Neogrammarians’ movement affirms that sound change is “regular”: sound “laws” have no exceptions. Neogrammarian axioms are still very much to the fore in several other branches of linguistic inquiry.
According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on? (149?)
It depends on the speaker-agreement on the norms of usage in speech communities. It is assumed that a linguistic change is embedded in a context of language maintenance. The degree to which change is admitted 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; thus, we need to explain, not only how communities resist change, but also how a change is maintained in the system after it has been accepted.
Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?
Because the sounds don’t physically change, but are substituted by a different sound
Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?
Because the sounds don’t physically change, but are substituted by a different sound.
What is meant by “lexical diffusion” (151)?
The meaning of the term “sound change” is crucial. We have argued elsewhere that it is not explainable as a wholly linguistic phenomenon: it is also inherently and necessarily a social phenomenon in that it comes about because speakers in conversation bring it about, speakers often have very strong feelings about it, and it is manifested in speaker-usage. I isn’t languages that change – it is speakers who change languages. Such a view is obviously a very long distance away from Neogrammarians 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 sociolinguists attempt to trace by their quantitative methods
What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152)
It is the displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time. For example, in the nineteenth century much New Zealand English was southern British in type (favoured by males), and it was displaced by an Australasian type (favoured by females).
What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar (152)?
These norms, called “community or vernacular”, are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms. They also manifest themselves at different levels of generality. Some of them, for example, characterize the dialect as a whole and are recognized by outsiders as markers of that dialect
What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?
Milroy mentions that a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without ever going to “completion” in the traditional sense.
Here, he is referring to the fact that whilst the practise of “h-dropping” is commonly used, 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.
Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the system? How are they connected (153)?
Speaker innovation is an act of the speaker, and it is unstructured and irregular, and not describable by quantitative or statistical methods. A change is manifested within the language system. They are connected because usually it is innovation what leads to the change, though at first it is probably thought to be an error or defective usage of some kind.
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 each single event of “borrowing” into a new speech community is just as much innovation as the presumed original event in the “original speech community”.
What is necessary for a sound to spread (157)?
Assuming a social pattern of some kind in a speech community
Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?
The historical linguistic tradition has been deeply influenced by the consequences of living in a standard language culture. The main influence is the ideology of the standard language.
Standard languages are not “normal” languages because 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
What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)
The clean data are those which have already been largely normalized, and dirty data are ones that we normally encounter, like the vernaculars we find in the speech community.