MILROY, SOME NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SOUND CHANGE: SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND NEOGRAMMARIANS
Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?
Sound change appears to have no rational motivation because it is impossible to see any progress or any benefit to the language or to its speakers. The change of one sound for another is based on individual discretion or preference; so, there is no profit and no lose apparently.
What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?
Neogrammarians’ theory is based on the idea that sound change is regular and always happens in the same context without exceptions (regularity principle) and were also interested in how sound change is compelled: sound change is lexically abrupt, although it is phonetically gradual.
The main difference between them is that Neogrammarians approached the language separated from their speakers and focused it as an object that’s why it was thought that linguistic change is independent of speakers; while Milroy’s sociolinguistic approach necessarily deals with speakers and different social contexts. Another difference is that phonetic change is studied by Neogrammarians as if there were different monolingual states; whereas sociolinguistic research focuses on localized varieties of a language that are not well-defined linguistic entities.
According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on? (149?)
Language change is dependent on a context of language maintenance. The degree to which change is admitted will depend of the degree of internal cohesion of the speech community (“strong ties”, which resist the change) and change from outside will be admitted to the extent that there are large numbers of “weak ties” with outsiders: the change has to be maintained by social acceptance and social pressure.
Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?
Milroy states that speech sounds do no physically change; but, in the course of the time, one sound is replaced by another and speakers of this dialect start to use the new sound where formerly used the old one.
So, sound change does not exist because what happens is a result of social process.
Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?
Milroy and other sociolinguistics state that it isn’t language that changes, but it is speakers who change languages. So this idea it different from that of “blind” change because change is a social phenomenon manifested in language usage.
What is meant by “lexical diffusion” (151)?
Lexical diffusion is a socially gradual process where the new form differs considerably from the original one. A distinction is made between “regular” sound change, where there is a slight change from the older form, and lexical diffusion, where there is a gross phonetic change.
What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152)
Dialect displacement means that a dialect is substituted for another one which is socially dominant in a particular time.
Milroy uses the example that much New Zealand English in the 19th century was southern British in type and it was displaced by an Australian type.
What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in class is similar (152)?
Community norms are those which exist apart from the standard ones and characterize a dialect as a whole. These norms are observed and conserved by speech communities often in opposition to standardizing norms and manifest themselves at different levels of generality.
What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion” (153)?
Milroy explains that a change can persist as a variable state over the centuries and it can not be completed in a traditional sense. He uses the example of h-dropping because it is commonly used, but we might never reach a point where the h-dropping usage is considered normative by all English speakers.
Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected (153)?
Both terms should reflect a conceptual distinction:
An innovation is an act of the speaker and when it occurs it must be irregular, unstructured and not describable by methods; so it is speakers who innovate, and not languages. However, a change is manifested within the language system.
An innovation may happen again and again without resulting in a linguistic change in the speech community. A change is not a change until it is assumed as a social pattern in a speech community.
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)?
The propagation of a change is by borrowing. Milroy affirms that the distinction between true sound change and phonological borrowing is poorly motivated with this statement: «a single event of borrowing into a new speech community is as much as an innovation as the presumed original event in the “original speech community”»
What is necessary for a sound to spread (157)?
Sound changes have normally been observed to spread gradually through the lexicon: sound spread can result from borrowing or a sudden replacement of one sound by another; however, all sound changes must be socially conditioned to spread, because they do not become changes until they are.
Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in “blind necessity” (158)?
From a sociolinguistic point of view, standard languages are not normal languages because they have been created by imposition (planned by human beings and maintained by prescription) and its sound patterns (and its changes, too) are thought to happen by “blind necessity”.
The ideology of standardization takes people to believe that dialects and other languages that have not been standardized have fuzzy boundaries and are indeterminate.
What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?
Milroy talks about “clean data” when referring to the standard language which has been shown as a uniform, unilinear and normalized language. Whereas “dirty data” refers to the vernacular languages we actually encounter in the speech community conceived as irregular and chaotic.