James Milroy: Some new perspectives on sound change: sociolinguistics and the Neogrammarians. 146-160.
Answer the following questions using the book and other sources.
Because it’s impossible to observe any process in a change of sound (example: a vowel different pronunciation). Arbitrariness sometimes appear as the only explication to the phenomenon.
Neogrammarians have a corpus of study that is still today hardly criticized:
Milroy defends sociolinguistic approaches relating languages and their variations with a community of speakers. Moreover, he shows a completely different methodology where spoken information has a big value and changes in language are produced for more reasons than blind necessity.
It depends strongly on the localized variety of the language, with them changes in progress are easily observable.
He is using a technique here to make a reflexion about how we would understand sound change if the theories we have assumed were false or hadn’t existed. Milroy wants that we think particularity about the Neogrammarians ideas and the fact that their axioms haven’t provided good structures to explain language internal characteristics. So, in this perspective sociolinguistic advances would have a major implication inside the society.
Because this model introduced by Neogrammarians is based on the assumption that sound change is produced for internal language processes which are independent with respect to the speakers. Milroy has the idea that social factors are essential for the sound change and all linguistics studies.
“Lexical diffusion” is a model related with sound change that explains the manner in which a phoneme variation can affect all the language system. This change spreads through the lexicon affecting other words with similar phonetic features.
It refers to the fact that one dialect can disappear in some regions favouring other language or new variations. The displaced dialect can leave a substratum or traces that will be adopted by the new speech.
One example of this could be located historically in New Zealand. During the nineteenth century predominated in this zone a variety of English very similar with southern British type, but the Australian English variation displaced it remaining poor features as inheritance.
They are related with language change. More concretely these words emphasize the fact that changes over speech are generally a result from modifying the assimilation that the speaker has about the norms.
Other term that we have used in class with reference to communities is the social importance that they develop with respect to the language.
Milroy explains that some sounds changes are very difficult to detect for the ear due to their phonetic steps. Perhaps /h/ sound has been dropped out but the magnitude of the change is minimal and we don’t realize of it.
Speakers have an important value on linguistic changes. They spread new sounds to other speakers participating in an active role to the language’s development, this is called social gradualness by sociolinguistics.
On the other hand, Neogrammarians have projected a theory in which speakers don’t intervene on language processes being sounds influenced only by an internal phonetically graduation (this model has been hardly criticized).
Because both processes (borrowing from one language to another and the replacement of sounds by speaker innovation) are patterns of linguistic change. Although they present different proceeds as the direct incorporation of words from foreign languages in one case or the acquisition of phonological changes in the other, both systems have the same result.
The most basic necessity is that all sound change must be socially conditioned. It isn’t considered a linguistic change until the sound has been adopted by more than one speaker. Apart from this, there are diverse circumstances that favour the relationship between languages and consequently the mixture of sounds like the dialect contact.
The standard register is a false one, in Milroy words standard languages are not “normal” languages. However, standard modalities have been created by organisms with a lot of power (like the army or politics) and have been maintained through a strong prescription.
Erroneously, people have thought that standard style was the correct and others were considered vulgar, so the lack of this register meant that speakers hadn’t a cultured model to use. This is the reason why in some places the standard variation was applied.
Clean data refers to the information that is exposed in a standard style while dirty data refers to a vernacular language.
Milroy prevents us of these idealizations because result chaotic. He emphasizes the injustice factors that non-standard languages have supported like all the normalizations that weren’t directed to them.
Saturnino Figueroa
March 2009
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