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

When the word meet changed from / me: t / to / mi: t / in English there did not seem to be any advantage in the fact that one sound was replaced by another.

On the other hand, when the word them replaced hem it disambiguated the system. So, instead of having a lot of similar sounds like him, her hem, for example we have him, her, them.

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

The main important difference is that Milroy takes a sociolinguistic or variationist view of language change while the Neogrammarians see language as an entity, which is somehow, separate from people. For Milroy, languages change because people change it.

According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on?

Language change depends on people and sociolinguistic conditions - not on the internal life of language, which is a concept that Milroy does not believe in.

Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist?

What actually happens is that another replaces one sound.

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

Because sound changes depends on people not on the internal “life” of a language.

What is meant by “lexical diffusion”?

This means that rather than a sound a sound being replaced by another throughout the whole language, the change takes place through word families or in particular phonetic contexts.

What does dialect displacement mean?

When one particular variety of a language is displaced by another.

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

Community or vernacular norms are the norms operating within a language community.

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

H- dropping is common in Cockney. One might say it is the norm. However, throughout England /h/ is the norm. In other places, people use /h/ in certain contexts and not in others. Any change might stop or there may be a change back to a former system.

Explain what Milroy means by “speaker innovation” and change in the system. How are they connected (153)?

Speaker innovation occurs when an individual uses, for example, a particular pronunciation, or coins a new word. Other speakers might imitate this pronunciation. If this innovation is incorporated into the language system, then a change can be said to have occurred. In the case of one sound replacing another we can imagine how a person might use an innovative pronunciation and how it might spread through a group of speakers to the wider community. As Milroy says, many innovations are ephemeral and lead nowhere.

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)?

Intra-language (within a language) and inter-language (between languages) borrowing are similar. Imagine a speaker in your language innovates and coins a new word or phrase. Gradually other people “borrow” or adopt the word or phrase and it finally becomes widespread. For example, por un tubo. In a similar way, people start using the word speed from the English word for amphetamine. For this word we get the adjective espitoso.

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

Change, if it happens, must happen within a speech community. The community must adopt an innovation. For this to happen social conditions must be favourable. Weak ties within a society favour change whereas closely-knit communities (comunidades cerradas) normally disfavor change.

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

If you believe in blind necessity you must believe that there is an entity –the standard- that is changing through internal forces that have nothing to do with speakers.

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

Standard varieties are engineered varieties of a language. In other words, the guardians of the language (for example, la RAE) dictate which words are allowed into a dictionary and which structures are permitted or not. This is clean data –it has been cleaned up. Dirty data, on the other hand, is when we describe a variety of a language –its inconsistencies such as, for instance, the examples we have seen in class in which both questions with and without do are found in the same variety. A diachronic example is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in which two ways of forming the interrogative exist: But why did not you look for the steps?/ How camest thou by the burden at first? Think of the pronunciations of dado /daðo/ and /dao/. Only one is standard but we all know that both co-exist.

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