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

Milroy say that sound change has no obvious function or rational motivation because there’s no benefit to the language or its speakers. There is apparently no profit and no loss when we change from [e] to [i], for example in words like: meet, need, keen… It is arbitrary.

2. What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians?

The Neogrammarians main axiom was that sound change is regular. When a sound has changed in a word, it should have happen the same change in other words with the same circumstances.

The three main characteristics of Neogrammarians thoughts are: dichotomy, non-social and written sources.

Milroy doesn’t agree with their study because he thinks that they found changes in languages definable as discret entities, not localized varieties. Neogrammarians also thought that monolingual state was the best form to study linguistic change, and Milroy thinks the opposite.

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

According to Milroy, language change depends on localized varieties in regional speech communities. He says that is in that varieties that we identify changes in progress, rather that in the “language”.

So, language change depends on the speech of nowadays.

4. Why does Milroysay that sound change actually doesn’t exist?

Milroy let us know that sound change doesn’t exist. He says that recent studies are like the first studies about that, because Neogrammarians’ ideas are not adapted. He thinks that their argumentations can’t deal adequately with what we actually observe.

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

Milroy thinks that sound change is something gradual that doesn’t appear suddenly, but what is more important for him is how we locate a sound change when it is in process and how we define it.

6. What is meant by “lexical diffusion”?

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

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

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

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

11. Why isn’t borrowing from one language to another and the replacement of one sound by another though speaker innovation with a language as radically different as the Neogrammarians posited?

12. What is necessary for a sound to spread?

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

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