NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SOUND CHANGE

1.Why does Milroy say that sound change appers to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?

        In the Milroy’s text tells the replacement of vowels is totally arbitrary, in addition, it’s no profit and no loss.

For example: the change of sound [e:] to  [i:] in words like keen, meet… It is impossible to see any profit or loss.

2.What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?

         Nowadays, students study communities and can find resources like bilingual or multilingual speech, in which every change in any language or crossing-language is studied before. However, The Neogrammarians studied languages as discrete entities, in which the changes were completed or nearly completed.  

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

        Language change depends on the norms of the community, because they seem to be socially conditioned.

4.Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?
   
        Milroy says that sound change doesn't actually exist because speech sounds don't physically change, but substitute one another in the course of time (diachronic fact) "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 sound change is a social process, language cannot change by itself.

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

        Lexical diffusion is both a theory and a phenomenon. The phenomenon is when a phoneme is modified in a subset of the lexicon, and spreads gradually to other lexical items. For example, in English, /uː/ 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.

7.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.  One example in the text is that Milroy refers to 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. Another example is: the displacement of valencian where Spanish grow up more and more reducing valencian language.

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

        “Community” or “Vernacular” norms are observer by speakers and maintained by communities, often in opposition to standard norms.

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

        Milroy thinks society may not reach an agreement in the social norm when deciding whether to use the h or not. 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. In this case, Milroy refers to the fact that the use of “h-dropping” is more used, while it is impossible that we will get to one moment where speakers of the English language treat as normative this usage.

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. When an innovation occurs in a speech community, normally, it’s a borrowing process. Moreover, when an innovation is observed, if it will lead to a change and it is probably thought to be an error or defective usage of some kind. Both terms are connected because when an innovation is socially accepted, it becomes a change in the system.

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)?

        First of all, we can know that a linguistic change is: it occurs for reasons of marking social identity, stylistic difference and so on, definition like a sociolinguistic phenomenon. But  if we think in Neogrammarian terms about sound change and borrowing, we must accept that all sound change depends on a process of borrowing. So every single innovation is the presumed original event in the “original speech community”. 

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

        It is the result of borrowing or a sudden replacement of one trill by another inside a social process.

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

        Because people need rules in order to help them to know what is wrong or right, “the ideology of standardization causes people to believe that they are indeed discrete physical entities” and it is independent of socially-based human intervention.

14.What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?
        Clean data is offered by standard languages; data which have already been largely normalized. Dirty data is data offered by vernaculars; it is irregular and chaotic.