A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

statement in (67b) was a ribbing that I received from one of my consultants. In short, she
was teasing me about my messy handwriting on my folder, because it looked like a lot of
little birds came and made a bunch of little tracks all over it. Again, the speaker has
morphological options in representing this teasing proposition, but it is ultimately a mii-
clause which is chosen for the ribbing to which I was subjected to. I have heard this
ribbing use of mii on various occasions.
What is ultimately significant here is that mii serves as a discourse stressor in much
the same way that English uses intonation contours to mark the same function within
English discourse. As noted in Fairbanks (2008, forthcoming), mii does not make use of
intonation contours within discourse that English does. What this means then is that
where English speakers make use of intonational contours to increase the illocutionary
force of narratives, Ojibwe speakers use mii for this same function. When used in this
way, mii makes the utterances that it occurs with more serious. This can be seen in the
following excerpt from a letter written by a native speaker (Na-gan-i-gwun-eb ‘Leading-
Feather-Sitting’) to Reverend Gilfillan in 1893.
(68) mii in serious statements 54 (Na-gan-i-gwun-eb, letter dated March 26, 1893, Red Lake,)
a) Niijii bangii giwiindamoon.
my friend a little I tell it to you
b) Mii-sa agaawaa gii-dagwishinaan.
that-is barely that I arrived
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I left the word-by-word glosses as represented in the original letter although I have disagreements with
his glosses for mii. I would gloss them as generally VER for ‘veridical marker’, since this appears to be its
function in this example. The glosses were presumably made by Reverend Gilfillan himself (a non-native
speaker of Ojibwe) before he donated his letters to the Indiana Historical Society (and which later
apparently ended up at the Minnesota Historical Society). I also transliterated the original orthography of
the letter to be conform with the orthography used in this thesis.
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