Toward a New Climax Stage for a Language?
Where does a language go after a climax stage has been reached? Climax forests exhibit a state of balance with their environment that may continue until it is interrupted when external forces like a change in climate may bring about significant change. It is intriguing to think that Seneca morphology may currently be moving toward a new pattern that is being triggered by a radical change in the environment within which the language is spoken.
All Seneca speakers today are at least equally fluent in English, and it is now English that all of them use most of the time in their daily lives. It is hardly surprising that when they speak Seneca they engage in a great deal of code switching. What is surprising, however, is that some of this code-switching takes place within words. Of particular interest here is the occurrence of Seneca verbs that have an English verb as their root. The following are a few examples, where I have underlined the English root:
Verbs like these exhibit new patterns in which some of the complexities governing the usual form of Seneca verbs have been modified. One modification is the position of the accent. The English verb root is always accented, regardless of its position within the word. In Seneca only even-numbered, nonfinal syllables receive a morphological accent, although they do so only under complex conditions involving the presence of closed syllables. According to that pattern (25a) is well-behaved, but (25b) is not (because the final syllable is accented), (25c) is not (because an odd-numbered syllable, the fifth, is accented), and (25d) is not (because the long e˛· at the beginning of the word counts as two syllables, and thus it is also the fifth syllable of this word that is accented). Seneca words may have more than one accent when the conditions are right, as they are for the second syllable in (25b), which is accented because the following, third syllable is closed. Thus (25b) has one accent assigned by the even-numbered syllable pattern and one assigned by the new pattern which says the English root must always be accented.
The shape of the pronominal prefixes within a Seneca verb is determined both by the initial sound of the following stem and by whatever morpheme (if any) happens to precede it. For example, the feminine singular prefix derived historically from the shape *ye- has that shape in yenóe‘s ‘she likes it’ but the shape-e-inwa‘é·ni·n˛o‘ ‘she bought it’, y˛o-iny˛od˛énotha‘ ‘she sings’, etc. These shapes are explainable from various historical processes, but speakers probably produce and recognize them in actual speech because they have learned entire words, or at least they have learned patterns that make the manifestations of the prefixes within entire words already familiar.
In the newly constructed Seneca verbs with English roots the choice of a form for the pronominal prefix has been simplified. With respect to what follows the prefix, all these verbs contain a-stems, so only the pronominal prefix forms that precede a-stems need be produced. The conversion into a-stems is accomplished by prefixing to the English root the middle voice morpheme, which can be seen as having the shape-ade- in the examples in (25), although this shape is partially obscured in (25d) by the regular change of a to ˛o after n. This middle voice marker no longer has its usual function of marking middle voice within these words, but seems to be present only to simplify the options for the shape of the preceding pronominal prefix.
What precedes the pronominal prefix has been standardized in a similar way. In these verbs with English roots the pronominal prefix is always preceded by a morpheme that Iroquoian linguists have called the dualic. In (25a) the dualic appears as de-, in (25b) as-t-, in (25c) as-d-, and in (25d) as d- plus a lengthening of the following vowel. These forms are themselves diverse, but they follow familiar patterns and combine with the following pronominal prefix in familiar ways. The dualic appears in a great many words, and any fluent Seneca speaker in some sense “knows” how to handle its various forms and the manner in which they combine with pronominal prefixes. The functions of the dualic prefix are varied too, but in these new verbs those functions have been lost; the dualic appears to be present only to narrow the choice of the pronominal prefix form to one possibility, namely the form that occurs between the dualic prefix and an a-stem.
These and other characteristics of these new Seneca words put them in a new morphological category, one in which accent patterns have been modified and several morphemes no longer function as they do in more traditional Seneca words. There is, then, the flowering of a new morphological pattern which, if the language continued to be used, would almost certainly become more and more widespread. This new development is obviously a response to environmental pressures radically different from those under which the Seneca language changed in the past. The overwhelming influence of English is leading to a uniquely new pattern for Seneca words. (The same development is taking place in Oneida, and probably other Northern Iroquoian languages.)
The question of productivity arises again. I have asked Seneca speakers whether it is possible to insert any English verb whatsoever into the middle of a new Seneca verb of this type. The answer has been no, there are just certain English words that have been adopted into the language in this way. But obviously their number is increasing. People are creating neologisms of this sort quite frequently, so that the process is in that respect analogous to the earlier process of noun incorporation. Although people recognize whether such a word is one they have heard before, new ones are being made, and they can enter the language without much trouble if people find them useful.
