A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

make use of the coordinator miinawaa in building texts via the accumulation of topics.
Rather, it is uses the contrastive marker idash to do this work, the work that and does in
English. So, it is no surprise that Ojibwe would use idash within adjacency pairs such as
the one in (60). In short, the use of idash in (60) allows an interlocutor to break the flow
of discourse centered around him or herself, in order to make the same query to the
originator of the question.
3.1.3 Preverbs
3.1.3.1 Relative preverb izhi
Ojibwe has one additional element that I analyze as a discourse marker, but whose
primary grammatical function is as a RELATIVE ROOT, or RELATIVE PREVERB
(Valentine 2001:160, 421-423, see also Nichols 1980:141-146 who calls them RELATIVE
PREFIXES). This element is izhi ‘thus, thither, how, in what manner’. In the Algonquian
literature, relative roots (and by extension, relative preverbs) are defined as elements
which “specify various relations between a verb and some element, which may serve to
indicate the predicate’s source, reason, manner, location, quantity, degree, or extent”
(Valentine 2001:421, see also Nichols 1980:141). 49 They may appear as either roots
inside words, or as compounded prefixal elements attached to a verb called “preverbs”. 50
This is shown for izhi in the following examples.
49
There are six such elements, one of which is izhi: ako- ‘so long, so far, since’, apiichi- ‘such intensity,
such extent’, izhi- ‘thus, thither’, onji- ‘thence, therefore’, daso- ‘so many’, and dazhi- ‘there’. Their root
variants are: akw-, apiit-, iN-, ond-, dasw-, and daN, respectively (Nichols 1980:142, Valentine 2001:160,
421-423).
50
Valentine defines a preverb as an “element which may [be] compounded to the front of a verb, to signal
information such as tense, direction, etc. For example, in gii-ni-giiwe, ‘Ansg [animate singular] went back
home,’ gii- and ni- are both preverbs. Each preverb is set off with its own hyphen” (Valentine 2001: 1050).
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