A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

(47) Discourse sequencer (Benjamin 2006, unpublished story)
a) Gegoo wawaanimigooyaang, mii imaa ezhaayaang ingiw chi-aya’aag
thing when we get stumped that when we go those elders
gagwejimangidwaa.
we ask them
b) Mii dash weweni izhi-wiindamawiyangidwaa mii o-keyaa omaa giinawind
and then carefully how-tell.3>1P/CONJ DP this way here we
ezhitwaayang.
our way of life
a) ‘Whenever we need to know something, that’s when we go to the elders and ask
them.
b) And then they carefully tell us the way we do things here.’
In this example, we see that mii dash occurs with the plain conjunct verb
izhi-wiindamawiyangidwaa ‘how they tell us’ (a behavior seen at the sentence level as
well), and has the function of advancing the narrative to the next event, action, or detail.
In this sense, mii dash is able to temporally relate prior talk with upcoming talk by
showing the natural progression of events, i.e. going to the elders and then being
instructed. This backward-looking and forward-looking feature of mii dash is
characteristic of its underlying deictic function. In this example, the temporal deictic
feature of mii is quite transparent, since the events are temporally based. There are cases,
however, where mii dash brackets details or commentary, rather than temporally based
events. This is shown in the following example where the speaker explains that a long
time ago each community had knowledge about different types of medicines and that the
knowledge of those medicines was a collective knowledge.
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