A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

5.0 Conclusion
I have accomplished two things in this thesis. First, I have identified and
characterized many of the common discourse markers occurring in Ojibwe which
heretofore have been largely unexplored. For example, while both linguists and second
language learners have known about the existence of the Ojibwe marker isa, its exact
function within discourse has largely been unknown. Many of the Ojibwe mystery
particles like isa, such as sha, gosha, goda, naa, for example, share a similar fate. We
know they exist, and that native speakers use them, but their functions as mystery
particles have been exactly that, mysteries. As a result, many listings for mystery
particles within dictionaries and pedagogical grammars have been labeled simply as
‘emphatics’, ‘particles’, ‘fillers’, or get no label at all. When a meaning is attributed to
these elements, they are usually poorly defined. The Ojibwe discourse connectives such
as inashke, though more transparent in their meaning, also have their fair share of
mysteries. For example, if you were to ask an Ojibwe language teacher in our
community what the word inashke (‘see!, look!, hear!’) meant, the answer you would
normally hear is: “It means behold!” The immediate difficulty which arises from this
definition is, of course, first figuring out what the meaning of the archaic word behold is,
how it is used within English, and then how to correlate that use back into Ojibwe which
may or may not coincide with its usage within English. In the end, such explanations
based upon archaic English words are no explanation at all. Many Ojibwe discourse
markers are just misunderstood, and this appears to be the reason why discourse markers
do not appear much in second language speaker speech (at least from my point of view).
Therefore, one of the objectives in writing this thesis was not only to document and
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