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

Language change depends on the degree of internal cohesion of the community and change from outside will be admitted to the extent that there are large numbers of weak ties with outsiders. It also follows that if a change persists in the system, it has again to be maintained by social acceptance and social pressure. But not only how communities resist change, but also how a change is maintained in teh system after it has been accepted.

4.Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?
 
Because linguistic change in general is a result of changes in speaker-agreement on the norms of usage in speech communities, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that a whole “dialect” can die out as another “dialect” replaces it, leaving only a few traces behind.

5.Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?

It isn’t languages that change; it is speakers who change languages. Such a view is obviously a very long distance away from the Neogrammarian notion that sound change is “blind”. It does not make sense, from this perspective, to say that sound-change is phonetically gradual either. But it is definitely socially gradual: it passes from speaker to speaker and from group to group, and it is this social gradualness that sociolinguistics attempt to trace by their quantitative methods.

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

Lexical diffusion is both a phenomenon and a theory. The phenomenon is that by which 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_diffusion

7.-What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152)

It is a displacement of one dialect by another which is, for some reason, socially dominant at some particular time.

An example of that phenomenon is the gradual displacement of heavily inflected  West Midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected East Midlands dialects.

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

Community and vernacular norms are different dialects of a language that demonstrates that other norms exist apart from the standard ones and that are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms. These norms manifest themselves at different levels of generality.

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

Milroy means that a sound change in language has to be accept by the community of speakers. If that norm is not accepted by all the members of the community, the change will not be produced. Milroy admits that a sound change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without ever reaching the complete change.

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 that must be unstructured and irregular. If we observe the speaker innovation, we don’t know if it will lead to a change because is probably an error or defective usage.

On the other hand, a change is manifested within the language system.

A speaker innovation to become a change must be adopted by some community. When an innovation is taken up by a speech community, the process involved is fundamentally a borrowing process; therefore, the implantation of a sound change depends on the borrowing of an innovation, it must pass from one speaker to others. Thus, the adoption, of a linguistic change depends at the speaker-level on a process of borrowing.

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, the “origin” of this abrupt change is equated with the change itself.And second it is assumed that the spread of change is by borrowing and implied that the spread therefore does not involve sudden replacement; this is to be “aside from its spread by borrowing”.

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

All sound change is implemented by being passed from speaker to speaker and we are not talking of a linguistic change until it has been adopted by more than one speaker. The spread of sounds can result from borrowing or a sudden replacement of one trill by another. We must point out that the spreading of sounds is a social process.

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

Standard languages are not “normal” languages, from a sociolinguistic perspective. They are created by the imposition of political and military power; hence the sound-patterns in them and the changes that come about in these sound patterns do not come about through blind necessity and they are not wholly explainable by reference to phenomena internal to the structure of language. These language states are planned by human beings and maintained through prescription. The idea that there are discrete languages that can be treated as if they were physical entities is in itself a consequence of standardization and literacy (discreteness of languages is not inherent in the nature of “Language” as a phenomenon.

14.-What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?

Clean data is information that has already been largely normalized and is provided by standard languages.

Dirty data is relatively intractable information and it is also irregular and chaotic.