A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

The verbs in bold type in (131a) and (131f) are plain conjunct verbs, evident by their
exclusive use of suffixes (i.e. -d ‘third person’, -waad ‘third person plural’) to mark
agreement for number and person, and by the absence of initial change. As Rhodes
points out, rather than acting as dependent clauses as the traditional rule would dictate,
they instead carry thematic content, acting as independent clauses instead. 65 It is
precisely this behavior that leads Rhodes to say: “[t]his traditional characterization of
verb forms as independent versus dependent can be quite misleading to a non-
Algonquianist syntactician because of the great variety of syntactic contexts in which
dependently inflectioned verbs appear, some of which are not obviously subordinate”
(Rhodes 2006:6, 110-113).
While early on it was known that plain conjunct verbs may sometimes pose as
independent clauses within certain contexts, the question remains: Why? No work to
date gives an explanation of the exact mechanism at work which makes such behavior
possible. Rhodes (1979) only highlights this phenomenon with a few examples, devoting
only one section to the phenomenon. Jones and Coleman (1979) provide a more detailed
description of this phenomenon in Kickapoo where they show that the conjunct order in
Kickapoo serves to mark eventline structures, but they do not account for it either. This
is obvious in their conclusion where they state:
65
The verb gaa-zhi-nkweshkwaad ‘that’s how he came to meet this bear’ in (131b) appears to me to be
thematic as well, since it too moves the plot forward. In fact, this verb is actually quite pivotal to this
passage of the story. He does not include this, however, in his analysis. As we will see, however,
syntactical factors come into play which may affect the shape of plain conjuncts within discourse, i.e.
conjuncts which appear with initial change, etc. In short, this verb is underlyingly a plain conjunct, but
must appear with initial change due to the presence of the relative root izhi. Therefore, verbs such as gaazhi-nkweshkwaad
may carry the eventline of a narrative as well, acting as independent clauses.
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