A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

advance a narrative to the next event, linking prior and upcoming text. What it retains,
however, within discourse is its indexical use. At the sentence level, izhi indexes an
outside antecedent to its containing verb in order to indicate manner or direction. It is
this indexical use, or pointing power, that is being borrowed for work at the discourse
level in order to cohere larger discourse units on a more global scale.
In sum, what all these discourse connective have in common is that they all have
sentence level functions which are then, in turn, exploited for work at the discourse level.
It is those elements which have core lexical or grammatical functions within sentence
grammars which find themselves as targets of discourse, since they easily lend
themselves for work on more global levels. Recall that this was the case, for example,
for the coordinating conjunction and in English. At the sentence level, it coordinates
similar linguistic categories, but at the discourse level, it coordinates similar units of
discourse. Recall that this was the case for the Ojibwe coordinator miinawaa as well.
As Schiffrin also noted, however, for some English discourse markers such as oh and
well, some markers have very little or no meaning. For these types of discourse markers,
their meaning can only be defined by their use within discourse. This is why such
markers are notoriously hard to define individually. They are dependent upon the context
in which they are being used for their meaning to become clear. In this sense, because
their use is not based upon an underlying sentence level use, i.e. lexical or grammatical,
they are what I call full-time discourse markers. In other words, while discourse
connectives may occur alongside their sentence level uses, these markers are always on
the job. And as we will see, their job within Ojibwe is to project attitude. The next
section will explore a number of these type of markers in Ojibwe.
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