A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

On the surface, idash in (51c) does not appear to be showing a contrastive relationship, in
that, it does not show a contrast between the propositions of its containing sentence with
that of the preceding sentences. In other words, the proposition they really respected the
birds in (51c) is not in semantic contrast with The Indians were happy when they heard
the birds arriving in (51a), nor the proposition They used to say, “Hey, we’re gonna make
it.” in (51b). The convention of translating these idash’s as ‘and’ only further
complicates what is really going on here. Closer examination of this narrative reveals,
however, that while the propositions themselves are not being contrasted, topic flow is.
Another way of saying this is that idash allows a break with prior text in order to
transition to a new topic, a topic shift. This has an additive effect of marking transitions
from topic to topic. In English, as Schiffrin has shown (as we saw already), these global
transitions are marked by and, but in Ojibwe, transitions from global topics (which are
dissimilar or unrelated) are marked by idash, leaving miinawaa to coordinate similar
details (coordinated content) within these global topics, i.e. lower level event structures.
For example, in (51) above, there are three discourse topics: 1) Indians were happy
when the birds came back, 2) Indians really respected the birds, and 3) they never hunted
them until they had hatched their eggs. There is really no logical semantic link, nor
temporal link, between the transition between the first topic to the second topic, or from
the second topic to the third topic. Also, these topics do not contain any inherent
contrasting content which would lend themselves for a contrastive relationship, as we
saw for the examples in (50) above. Here, idash does not facilitate a propositional
contrast, but a contrast in discourse action, i.e. transition. In other words, idash signals a
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