A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

discussed within the body of this thesis) is being taught to students at some Minnesota
universities and colleges to be a sentence-initial element, a usage similar to the English
additive marker and. 4 This stems largely from the fact that the instructors at these
particular institutions are non-native speakers themselves, and have apparently re-
patterned the use of second-position element idash to conform to the English usage. The
other discourse structuring element izhi ‘and then, and so’ (also to be discussed), as well
as a whole slew of other discourse particles, appear (from my vantage point) to be largely
non-existent in the speech of even fluent second language speakers. Thus, discourse
markers as a token of language use are largely unexplored and are a widely
misunderstood area of the language. Also, because university curricula and many self-
published grammars to date usually only amount to re-workings of prior research,
revealing a scarcity of new research, further documentation and new research in the area
of discourse markers would serve to broaden our knowledge and scope of the Ojibwe
language as a whole. 5
In formal linguistic circles, a study of discourse markers in Ojibwe would be a
significant contribution to the area of discourse marker research in general, since the
4
Some students from these institutions end up teaching in immersion programs. The concern here, of
course, is that the incorrect use of discourse markers (as well as other syntactic phenomena) will be
transmitted to the children participating in these immersion programs. Though many times native speaking
elders accompany these younger speakers in the classroom, it is the language of the younger second
language speaker that is primarily modeled for these children. Such a scenario appears to be common in
immersion settings, since the younger, energetic speakers are usually the ones running classroom activities.
5
What I mean here is that because many of the student grammar books for Ojibwe are largely written by
non-native speakers (who are usually not linguists), the material that appears in these grammars typically
do not represent new research, but largely amounts to re-workings (or re-hashings) of previously published
materials, e.g. a heavy reliance on Baraga’s grammar . Alternatively, if new aspects of the language are
explored, they are usually not adequately characterized. While these grammars have their value, we are not
moving on to new unexplored territory in the Ojibwe language. My point here is that we need new
research on the Ojibwe language in order to capture what we still do not know about the language. There
are student grammars, however, written by native speakers which have greatly added to our knowledge and
insight to the language. One of these is the grammar written by Pat Ningewance (Ningewance 2004), a
native speaker from Lac Seul, Ontario. We need more of these too!
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