JAMES MILROY: SOME NEW PERSPECTIVES ON
SOUND CHANGE: SOCIOLINGUISTICS AND THE NEOGRAMMARIANS.
146-160.
Why
does Milroy say that sound change appers to have no
“obvious function or rational motivation” (146)?
Milroy says that sound change is
probably the most mysterious aspect of change in language, as it appears to
have no obvious function or rational motivation. He talks about that it is
impossible to see any progress or benefit to the language or its speakers –the
use of one vowel- sound rather than another is purely arbitrary. The question
of sound change seems to be weightiest, and the greatest challenge to our
powers of explanation.
What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy’s approach and that of the Neogrammarians (147-148)?
The main difference between
Milroy’s approach and the Neogrammarians is that the
first believes that language change is external because it arbitrarily changes
due to the speaker’s change in its use. The Neogrammarians
believe that language change is something related to internal factors of the
language, meaning that they would have to separate language from its speaker
and focus on it as an object.
According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on? (149?)
Milroy believes that language
change depends on the degree of internal cohesion of the community.
Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn’t exist (150)?
Milroy declares that speech sounds
do not physically change. Speakers of a given dialect substituted one sound
used before, for another different. That is a gradually and variably change in
the course of time.
Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when
they say that sound change is “blind” (150)?
Some scholars in the past had made
equal phonetic gradualness and social gradualness, when they said that a change
is phonetically gradual they really meant that change spreads from speaker to
speaker, gradually in the social dimension. On the other hand, many others have
believed in the imperceptibility of change, the idea that sound change takes
place in very small phonetic steps which are really difficult to detect.
What is meant by “lexical diffusion” (151)?
An abrupt
type of change in sound which allow us to appreciate the changing.
That's why the new sound provided is rather different than the older one.
What does dialect displacement mean? Give an example. (152)
It means the displacement of one
dialect by another which is, for some one reason, socially dominant at some
particular time. An example could be the gradual displacement of heavily
inflected West Midland dialects of Middle English by weakly inflected
What are “community” or “vernacular” norms? What term that we have used in
class is similar (152)?
The norms are observed are
observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to
standardizing norms. These norms manifest themselves as a whole and are
recognized by outsiders as markers of that dialect. Others are hardly
accessible except by quantitative methods and may function within the community
as markers of internal social differences, for example, gender differences.
What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach “completion”
(153)?
Milroy means that 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 (153)?
An innovation is an act of the
speaker. It must be unstructured and ‘irregular’ and not describable by
quantitative or statistical methods. However, a change is manifested within the
language system.
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)?
Sound change and borrowing
distinction is sometimes formulated as a distinction between internally and
externally motivated change. Although it is a well
motivated distinction in certain respects, it can be problematic at the level
of phonological and morphological structure.
What is necessary for a sound to spread (157)?
When an innovation is taken up by
a speech community, the process involved fundamentally a borrowing process. All
sound change is implemented by being passed from speaker to speaker. It must be
socially conditioned, because those changes that arise spontaneously are
innovations and they do not become changes until they have assumed a social
pattern in the community.
Why does believing in the ideology of standardization lead to believing in
“blind necessity” (158)?
Standard languages are not normal
languages. They are created by the imposition of political and military power.
They are not completely explainable by reference to phenomena internal to the
structure of language. This language states are planned by human beings and
maintained through prescription. The idea that deals with sound changes these
well-defined socially constructed entities must always come about blindly and
independently of socially-based human intervention is another consequence of believing
in the ideology of standardization.
What does Milroy mean by “clean” and “dirty” data (158)?
The
vernaculars that we actually encounter in the speech community are relatively
intractable because the data we come across is to greater extent ‘dirty’ data,
whereas standard languages provide the investigator with relatively ‘clean’
data which have already been largely normalized.