A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

use as they occurred in real time within interactions between speakers themselves, or with
those of us visiting the elders.
Many of the texts published in the Oshkaabewis Native Journal, however, were
limited in their usefulness for a rigorous study of discourse markers. One problem that
these texts presented was that many of the authors of these published stories did not make
it a practice to check their transcriptions and translations with their original speakers (or
any other native speaker) for accuracy. Therefore, many of these published texts are
riddled with both transcription and translation errors. In such cases, where there was an
accompanying audio provided with the transcription (which is a common practice for the
Oshkaabewis Native Journal), I redid both the transcription and translations for those that
I looked at for purposes of this thesis, and checked my work with my consultants at Mille
Lacs. These corrected texts provided a much clearer picture of discourse marker use.
The Portage Lake texts, though not accompanied by original audio, were quite reliable as
the editor of those texts vigorously worked out both the translation and transcription with
the author of the stories. Many examples of discourse marker use are cited throughout
this thesis. In regards to actual discourse marker usage either found in stories or within
my notes, I queried my consultants as to their various meanings and usage. Many times,
my consultants were easily able to provide translations for discourse markers, but other
times they could not. This is no surprise, however, since discourse markers are
notoriously difficult to translate. In all cases, however, I gave great attention to the
context in which markers were used, and in what capacity they were being used. I have
tried to incorporate these various contexts within the characterizations of the discourse
markers appearing in this thesis.
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