A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

knowledge of their use, but because they “defy analysis even at a relatively advanced
stage of research” (Longacre 1976:468). The reality is that they are difficult to define,
even by their users. Because of this difficulty, all glosses for mystery particles will carry
the abbreviated label of “DM” (for “discourse marker”), rather than a quick and dirty
English gloss. While pauses may occasionally accompany these markers, many times
they do not. Significant pauses, if any, will be marked with a comma. Three types of
mystery particles will be discussed in the sections to come. Those which occur in initial
position will be discussed in Section 6.2.1, those which occur in second position will be
discussed in 6.2.2, and second position clusters will be discussed in Section 6.2.3.
3.2.1 Initial position
3.2.1.1 mii as a veridical marker
The particle mii has three major functions in Ojibwe, as a deictic particle, as an
aspectual marker, and as a veridical marker (Fairbanks 2008, forthcoming). In that work,
mii was characterized primarily as to function, not category. In terms of discourse, mii is
certainly a discourse marker though, having both textual and epistemic functions in
discourse. In fact, it shows behavior typical of discourse markers cross-linguistically, in
that, its use in discourse is multifunctional. It has specific uses at the sentence level, but
also additional uses at the discourse level. These functions were discussed in detail in my
earlier work, and so only a concise exposition will be given here. In that work, mii was
only described in terms of its function as a veridical marker. Veridical markers,
according to Payne, express “an increased intensity of the truth of the proposition,
something like the adverbial use of really in English” (Payne 1997:254). In other words,
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