A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

(62) Relative roots invoke initial change (Mille Lacs Sessions)
a) Gego anaamimishiken wiininoyan.
don’t don’t blame me be fat.2/CONJ
‘Don’t blame me that you are fat.’
b) Gego anaamimishiken ekaamoyan.
don’t don’t blame me IC.be so fat.2/CONJ
‘Don’t blame me for how fat you are.’
In this example, two words relating to fatness are used along with the same carrier
sentence don’t blame me that: wiinino ‘s/he is fat’, and ikaamo ‘be so fat’. While not so
transparent on the surface, the morphological structure of ikaamo is made up of the
relative root iN ‘in a certain manner’ and -gaamo ‘fat’. Within the same syntactical
environment, it is ikaamo which undergoes initial change to ekaamoyan, not wiinino
(which contains no relative root). At this point, it is unclear to me why initial change
would be triggered by the mere presence of a relative root. This process applies to
relative preverbs as well (to be discussed more in Section 4.2).
While izhi has its primary function as a relative root within verbs, or as relative
preverbs within verbal complexes, it has a secondary function in discourse as a discourse
connective. Nichols recognized this usage as well, saying that in narrative discourse, izhi
“links clauses or sentences sequentially” (Nichols 1980:144). Though he did not
characterize izhi as a discourse marker per se, izhi shows all the signs of a discourse
marker, i.e. able to link prior text with upcoming text, adding textual coherence, having a
function within sentence grammar as well as being borrowed for discourse work above
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