Florescence as a Force in Grammaticalization
A language is like a forest. Its diverse features — phonological, morphological, semantic, and so on — are like a community of plants that flourish together in a particular environment at a particular time, its composition continually modi fied through internal competition and changes in the environment until, if external factors do not intervene, there arrives a climax stage in which the plants and the environment have entered a state of mutually supportive equilibrium. Further environmental changes, if they occur, will then disturb that equilibrium, precipitating another round of innovations.
Like forests, languages may develop toward a climax stage where particular combinations of features, like plant communities, may flourish to define a particular language type. I think it is useful to think in terms of the florescence of linguistic features in this sense — the flowering of features that come to dominate the form a language takes. Here I intend to illustrate florescence as a force in grammaticalization with examples that give the Northern Iroquoian languages their distinctive cast, focusing on the proliferation of pronominal prefixes and noun incorporation. In both respects these languages exhibit an exuberance that is obvious to anyone who observes their structure. I will suggest that these features reached a climax stage in the languages of the Five Nations of the Iroquois. I will also suggest that the florescence of these two features can profitably be understood in terms of responses to certain aspects of Northern Iroquoian culture. Finally, I will show how a recent change in the external environment, the current overwhelming influence of English, is causing a further typological shift.
The Iroquoian language family is split north and south into two distinct branches. In the south are the several dialects of Cherokee, in the north the more numerous but relatively closely related languages of the Northern Iroquoian branch. Glottochronology suggested that this north-south split took place between three and four thousand years ago (Lounsbury 1961), although I suspect that this time depth may be exaggerated. Among the northern languages the deepest split separates Tuscarora from the rest. It may be between one and two thousand years ago that the ancestors of the Tuscarora migrated southward into an area in the eastern part of what is now North Carolina. Early in the eighteenth century they moved back north to be accepted as the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois, joining the original Five Nations made up of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. Those five, plus the slightly more divergent Huron, constitute what linguists sometimes call Lake Iroquoian because of their proximity to the Great Lakes. In other words Lake Iroquoian consists of Northern Iroquoian minus Tuscarora. At the time of first European contact there were other Lake Iroquoian languages. We know next to nothing about most of them, but we do have small vocabularies of Susquehannock (Mithun 1981) and Stadaconan, the latter often called Laurentian (Mithun 1982). Figure 1 summarizes the relationships between the extant Iroquoian languages, with Huron added. Cayuga is in parentheses because there is some evidence that it split off from the Lake languages at an earlier time, only to be reintegrated into that group in such a way that it attained eventually a close affinity to Seneca (Chafe and Foster 1981). I have also suggested in Figure 1 that there is a remote relationship between Proto-Iroquoian and Proto-Caddoan, and that relationship will have some bearing on the discussion to follow. (For more on the possibility of this relationship see Chafe 1976.)
Cherokee and the Northern Iroquoian languages have, in general, quite similar verb morphologies. Both are polysynthetic, with simple and complex verb stems to which are attached various aspect suffixes and pronominal prefixes, as well as a number of optional prepronominal prefixes. The verb stems may be expanded with various derivational elements that are similar across the family in nature and sometimes in form. There are, however, two ways in which the verbs of the Northern Iroquoian languages are more elaborate than those of Cherokee: the northern languages have larger sets of pronominal prefixes and they make greater use of noun incorporation as a way of expanding the verb stem. In both respects the northern languages show a florescence of typological devices whose seeds must have been present at the Proto-Iroquoian stage, as evidenced by their somewhat more modest manifestations in Cherokee.
