A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

(48) mii dash (Clark 2003:55, audio)
a) Gaawiin ongow anishinaabe, ganabaj awiiya kina gegoo mashkiki
not these Indian probably someone all things medicine
odaa-bi-gikendanziin.
s/he would not come to know it
b) Eniwek, eniwek ge-gikendaasopan kina ji-ganawendang o’ow mashkiki,
quite quite s/he would have to be knowledgeable to keep it this medicine
awegonen ge-minokaagod a’aw anishinaabe, gegoo inaapined.
what what is good for him/her that Indian thing when s/he gets sick
c) Mii dash bebakaan weweni o-gii-kikendaanaawaa awegonen o’ow,
and then each different carefully 3-PAST-know it.3P/INDEP what this
enaabadak o-mashkiki.
how utilized this medicine
a) ‘No one person would know everything about medicine.
b) One would have to be pretty knowledgeable to keep all the medicine that’s good
for people when they got sick with something.
c) And so they each knew different utilizations of medicine.’
Examining this example, we find that mii dash occurs with independent order verb
ogii-kikendaanaawaa ‘they knew it’ (contrary to sentence level behavior), and advances
the narrative by providing additional commentary, not by providing the next temporal
event. 45 Though the clauses are not temporally related, they are sequentially aligned with
mii dash.
What these data really show is that mii dash is a cluster which occurs in initial
position. While mii has specific sentence level functions, it is borrowed for work above
45
The fact that mii dash may occur with both conjunct and independent order verbs is intriguing. The
literature to date has opted to treat cases where mii dash occurs with independent forms as exceptions or as
rare cases, rather than to offer an explanation for these occurrences. As it turns out, there is a discourse
explanation. This explanation is provided in Section 8.2.
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