1.- Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation”?(146)

Sound change is probably the most mysterious aspect of change in language, as it appears to have no obvious function or rational motivation. 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: there is apparently no profit and no loss.

2.- What is/are the main difference/s between Milroy's approach and that of the Neogrammarians? (147/148)

Neogrammarian movement is from late nineteenth-century. Their basic axiom is that a 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.

3.- According to Milroy, what is language change dependent on?

4.- Why does Milroy say that sound change actually doesn't exist?

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

Because for him, it is speakers who change the language.

6.- What is meant by “lexical diffusion”?

It is a process socially gradually, and a abrupt replacement pattern. It can be shown to be regular in some sense.

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

Dialect displacement means that one dialect is displaced by another one which is socially dominant at some particular time.

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

Language is a normative phenomenon. The norms of language are maintained and enforced by social pressures. It is customary to think of these norms as standardizing norms – norms that are codified and legislated for, and enforced in an impersonal way by the institutions of society. But the fact that we can recognize different dialects of a language demonstrate that other norms exist apart from the standard ones, and that these norms are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms. It is convenient to call these community norms or vernacular norms. These norms manifest themselves at different levels of generality. Some of them characterize the dialect 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 difference.

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

When the direction of change has been more clearly set – there will be a regular social pattern in terms of age, sex, social class and other social variables, and it is through this that we will recognize linguistic change in progress. It should also be noted that the starting point and the end-point of change are not necessarily uniform states. As Milroy tried to show in a paper on /h/-dropping, a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without ever going to 'completion' in the traditional sense.

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

The distinction between innovation and change leads to an associated distinction – the distinction between speaker innovation, on the one hand, and linguistic change , on the other. The terms innovation and change should reflect a conceptual distinction: an innovation is an act of the speaker, whereas a change is manifested within the language system. It is speakers, and not languages, that innovate. It should also be noted that an innovation, when it occurs, must be unstructured and 'irregular' and not describable by quantitative or statistical methods.

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?

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

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

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

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.

Standard languages are also socio-political entities dependent on powerful ideologies which promote 'correctness' and uniformity of usage.

Another reason for this inadequacy is that whereas standard languages provide investigator which relatively 'clean' data which have already been largely normalized, the vernaculars that we actually encounter in the speech community are relatively intractable: the data that we actually encounter is to a greater extent 'dirty' data. To the extent that the data-base of sociolinguistic investigations presents itself as irregular and chaotic, progress in understanding linguistic change will largely depend on our ability to cope with these 'dirty' data and expose the systematicity behind them.