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ANSWERS ON MILROY

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

-          He gives us an example of the change from [e:] to [i:] (as in such items as meet, keen, need). And argues that this change – the use of one vowel-sound rather than another - brought no progress or benefit to the language or its speakers. He considers it purely arbitrary, and so there is no profit or loss.

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

-          different data-base available for study and the methods used to study the data-base (scholars now have access to bilingual and multilingual speech communities x Neogrammarians’ monolingual states)

Neogrammarians approach:

-          sound change is regular, sound laws have no exceptions (when a sound is observed to have changed in a particular lexical item, the regularity principle predicts that it should also have changed in the same way in all other relevant items)

-          regular sound change is phonetically gradual but lexically abrupt

Milroy:

-          in speech community researches, we do not deal with well-defined linguistic entities that can be regarded as uniform, but with highly variable states that do not have clearly defined boundaries

-          Neogrammarians depended on documentary records and could not observe language in the community (they did not actually know whether sound change was implemented in a phonetically gradual manner – phonetic gradualness was hypothesis)

According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on?

-          A linguistic change is embedded in a context of language (or dialect) maintenance

-          the degree to which change is admitted will depend 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

Why does Milroy say that sound change actually does not exist?

-          speech „sounds“ do not physically change: what happens is that in the course of time one sound is substituted for another; speakers of a given dialect gradually and variable begin to use sound X in environments where speakers formerly used sound Y. Historical linguistic scholar then observe the result of this essentially social process and apply the term sound change to the phenomenon

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

-          language change is inherently and necessarily a social phenomenon in that it comes about because speakers in conversation bring it about (it is not language that change – it is speakers who change languages) x Neogrammarians tended to separate languages from their speakers and to focus on language as an object – often likening it to a living thing

What is meant by „lexical diffusion“?

-          a replacement pattern – sound change spreads through particular group of words

What does dialect displacement mean?

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

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

-          norms observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms

-          dialect

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

-          the starting point and the end-point of change are not necessarily uniform states, a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without ever going to „completion“ in the traditional sense

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

-          speaker innovation: an act of the speaker; arise spontaneously; vast majority of them are ephemeral and lead nowhere

-          change: manifested within the language system; must be socially conditioned (must be adopted by some community); sociolinguistic phenomenon

-          although we can in principle observe linguistic innovations, we do not know when we observe them whether they are innovations that will lead to changes

Why is not 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?

-          each single event of borrowing into a new speech community is just as much an innovation as the presumed original event in the original speech community (and even that some of these events are independent innovations)

What is necessary for a sound to spread?

-          the implementation of a sound change depends on the „borrowing“ of an innovation: all sound change is implemented by being passed from speaker to speaker

Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in „blind necessity“?

-          standard languages are carefully constructed in order to appear as if they are discrete linguistic entities – and the ideology of standardization causes people to believe that they are indeed discrete physical entities – whereas dialects and languages that have not been standardized have fuzzy boundaries and are indeterminate

-          the idea that the sound changes differentiating these well-defined socially-constructed entities must always come about blindly and independently of socially-based human intervention

What does Milroy mean by „clean“ and „dirty“ data?

-          clean: have already been largely normalized; provided by standard languages

-          dirty: provided by vernaculars that are relatively intractable