A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

d) mii imaa wenji-wiidabimaad ishkwaandeming, mii a’aw ogichidaa,
DP there why he sits with her at the door DP that brave
e) wiin igo niigaanizi gaye miigaadiwind wiin igo iwidi niigaan,
he EMPH he leads also when there is a battle him EMPH over there in front
ani-miigaazod.
as he goes into battle
f) Wa’aw idash ogichidaa, mii imaa namadabiwaad ishkwaandeming
this DM brave DP there that they are sitting at the door
miinawaa iniw wiiwan.
and that his wife
g) Gibiiga’igaade dash i'iw ayi’ii ishkwaandem wiigiwaam.
be curtained DM that whatchamacallit door lodge
a) ‘It turns out that there was a battle there, they were camping where the battle
was.
b) There must have been a battle there where they were camping.
c) He has a wife;
d) he’s sitting next to her at the doorway, that brave.
e) He leads the battle, he is at the front going into battle.
f) This is that brave, sitting at the doorway with his wife.
g) There is a curtain on the door of the lodge.’
After a brief background statement in (52a,b) about a battle having taken place where
they were camping, the narrator uses idash to introduce three topics (here, new
participants or characters within the story), all accented by idash: that the brave had a
wife in (52c), the brave’s position by the door in (52f), and the curtained door of the
lodge in (52g). It is the contrastive feature of idash that allows the narrator to jump from
participant to participant, in essence, breaking from prior discourse (details of a particular
participant) in order to move on to other pertinent details or participants of a story. It is
not propositional content itself that finds itself in contrast, but the narrator’s discourse
action of participant description that does.
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