A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

describe these elements (which in itself is an important endeavor), but to begin to bring to
light the various meanings and functions of these elusive elements so that they may start
to become common knowledge among the second language speaker community. Once
these markers become common knowledge and commonly taught, they then can start to
make their way into the speech patterns of the second language speakers, who in turn
may start to use them with their babies in the home. Otherwise, we risk losing (in a very
short amount of time mind you) a whole array of markers that provide nuance and color
to the language.
The second thing that I have accomplished is the expansion of Schiffrin’s initial
characterization of discourse markers to include the trends of discourse markers cross-
linguistically. This has revealed that a variety of elements may function as discourse
markers across languages, including: individual words, lexicalized phrases, clitics,
affixes, and preverbs; and that markers may occur in a host of positions within an
utterance or sentence: utterance initially, utterance internally, utterance finally, and in
second position. Ojibwe has been especially instructive in regards to this cross-linguistic
evidence since it not only employs the use of utterance initial words for discourse work
(such as inashke, awenh, aaniish), but also second position clitics and particles (such as
idash/-sh, isa, sha, gosha, naa), and a relative preverb (izhi). Other languages with rich
morphological structures like Ojibwe also show a tendency toward the use of clitics and
affixes as discourse markers. What this indicated to me was that speakers may use the
linguistic/grammatical machinery available to them in the language in order to
accomplish discourse work. This was also supported by the fact that some speakers of
indigenous languages of the Americas, such as Tojolab'al and Yucatec Maya, have
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