Exercises about sound change
Answer the following questions using the book and other sources.
Milroy says that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” because there are words in the history of English like: meet, need or keen which change in their pronunciation from [e:] to [i:], so, Milroy claims that “is impossible to see any progress or benefit to the language or its speakers -the use of one vowel- sound rather than is purely arbitrary”.
The main difference between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians is that Milroy says sound change appears as an “arbitrary” way as I have said in the last exercise. Instead of that, Neogrammarians think that sound change is “regular”, they mean, when a sound has changed in a particular lexical item, “the regularity principle predicts that it should also have changed in the same way in all other relevant items”, however, in case of an apparent exception will be due to “another regular change”.
Milroy says that language change is based on “the degree of internal cohesion of the community” that is to say, there are communities which don’t resist change, so the language changes, however, others resist because of their boundaries. In a way the language change is a social issue.
Also, Milroy comments that “if a change persists in the system, it has again to be maintained by social acceptance and social pressure”.
- Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?
Milroy distinguishes between “phisical change” and “substitution sound”, he means that “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 were speakers formerly used sound Y”.
- Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?
Milroy disagrees with the Neogrammarians because he thinks that sound change is “an inherent and necessary social phenomenon” which “comes about because speakers in conversation bring it about” and gradually changes passing “from speaker to speaker and from group to group”. He doesn’t think that languages changes by themselves as the Neogrammarians think.
For that reason, I think that the Neogrammarians call sound change as “blind” because the language has no body, so it can’t move and see, it doesn’t need to anybody, I mean, the language changes by itself.
“Lexical diffusion” is “an abrupt replacement patterns and can be shown to be regular in some sense” and “the end of a continuum”.
Displacement means the change of one dialect “by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time”. For example, “the gradual displacement of heavily inflected West Midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected East Midland dialects”.
“Community” or “Vernacular” norms are dialects which have their own norms apart from the standard ones. They are characterized “as a whole and are recognized by outsiders as markers of that dialect” and “ may function within the community as markers of internal social differences”, also they are said to be “variable noms”.
The term could be “social variability”.
Milroy means that “a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without ever going to ‘completion’ in the traditional sense”.
Milroy means by “speaker innovation” that “ is an act of the speaker”, that is to say, people produce innovations, not languages and this happens when the change is adopted by some community, “It must pass from one speaker to others”, whereas a change in the system consists on a change produced by languages themselves.
Also, Milroy comments that linguistics sometimes make mistakes doing wrong distinctions between innovation and change.
Both “speaker innovation” and “change” are connected because they take place in the “borrowing” process.
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”.
It’s necessary “a sudden replacement of one trill by another”. A spread sound is conditioned by social changes.
Because “from a sociolinguistic perspective, standard languages are not ‘normal languages’. They are created by the imposition of political and military power” and “Standard languages are carefully constructed in order to appear as if they are discrete linguistic entities”.
- What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?
Milroy refers to “Clean” data as a “data which have already been largely normalized” and are also “uniform” and “unilinear”.
And he refers to “Dirty” data as a “data which are irregular and chaotic”.