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

Because it is impossible to see any progress or benefit to the language or its speakers, so there is apparently no profit and no loss.

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

They differ in the fact that present-day scholars have access to bilingual and multilingual speech communities, in which cross-language patterns of variation can be studied, and also in the research on social dialectology, which focuses not on whole languages, but on localized varieties in regional speech communities, whilst the Neogrammarians studied languages as discrete entities, in which the changes were completed or nearly completed.

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

It depends on the speaker-agreement on the norms of usage in speech communities.

- 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 language doesn’t change itself, it is the speakers who change the language.

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

It is in many ways the same as the “normal” sound change, except in this case the old and the new form differ markedly while in gradual phonetic change the difference is less.

- 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 (152)?

They are the norms which are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms.

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

That a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries and not going to completion in the traditional sense.

- 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 on 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)?

It needs to assume 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)?

Because the standardization leads people to believe that the language is a discrete physical entity, and it is independent of socially-based human intervention.

- 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.