James Milroy: Some new perspectives on sound change: sociolinguistics and the Neogrammarians.146-160.

Answer the following questions using the book and other sources.

Why does Milroy say that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or

rational motivation” (146)?

Milroy says that sound change appears to have no “obvious function or rational motivation” because the sound change is probably the most mysterious aspect of change in language.

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

Neogrammarians (147-148)?

One important Neogrammarian claim is that regular sound change is phonetically gradual but lexically abrupt. The Neogrammarian axioms have at least three characteristics: they tend to be dichotomous; they are non-social in character: although the Neogrammarians recognized the importance of listening to present-day dialects their main sources are written.

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

The degree to which the change is admitted will depend on the degree of internal cohesion in 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 doesn’t exist (150)?

Milroy sais that speech sound does not physically change, what happens is that one sound is substituted by another.

Why does Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians when they say that sound

change is “blind” (150)?

Milroy disagree with the Neogrammarians because he defend that it isn´t languages that change, it is speakers who change languages. The article says that such view is a very long distance away from the Neogrammarian notion that sound change is “blind”.

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. The related theory is that all sound changes originate in a single word or a small group of words and then spread to other words with a similar phonological make-up, but may not spread to all words in which they potentially could apply. The theory of lexical diffusion stands in contrast to the Neogrammarian hypothesis that a given sound change applies simultaneously to all words in which its context is found.        ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_diffusion)

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

 Dialect displacement: 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 (152)?

“Community and vernacular norms”, are other norms that exist apart from the standard ones, and these norms are observed by speakers and maintained by communities often in opposition to standardizing norms.

What does Milroy mean when he says that h-dropping may not ever reach

“completion” (153)?

Like he tried to show in a paper on /h/ dropping, a change can persist as a variable state for seven or eight centuries without ever foing to “completion” in the traditional sense.

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

Like Milroy said in his article, all sound-change must be socially conditioned, simply because those so-called changes that arise spontaneously are not actually changes: they are innovations, and they do not become changes until they have assumed a social pattern in the community.

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)?

It is possible to argue that 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”.

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

Sound changes have normally observed to spread gradually through the lexicon. The spread of sounds can result from borrowing. We must point out that the spreading of sounds is a social process.

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

necessity” (158)?

From a sociolinguistic perspective, standard languages are not “normal” languages. 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.

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

The term clean data refers to data that follows the rules of referential integrity (whether or not referential integrity is enforced by the RDBMS). Clean data also implies that any fields in the data that might have had different values with the same meaning have been transformed to have the same values.

    (Sistema de ayuda IBM)

Dirty data is a term used by IT practitioners when creating data capture forms. Dirty data is data that is misleading, incorrect or without generalized formatting, contains spelling or punctuation errors, data that is input in a wrong field or duplicate data. It is commonly prevented using input masks or validation rules; however, completely removing the dirty data from a database is impossible in some cases.

  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_data)