A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

incorporated the use of markers from contact languages (such as Spanish) alongside the
use of their own indigenous markers. Other machinery exploited for discourse use is the
lexical or grammatical inventory existing in language itself. The cross-linguistic data
have consistently shown that many lexical or grammatical items are exploited for their
sentence level use for work at the discourse level. This sort of raiding of the inventory is
not restricted to individual words, affixes, clitics, or preverbs, however, but also to entire
inflectional systems. Recall that Ojibwe makes regular use of conjunct order verbs (verbs
which are subordinate clauses at the sentence level, but have other ‘connecting’ features
as well) to mark the eventline of narratives or stories. In other words, verbs which
normally mark subordinate clauses at the sentence levels may act as independent clauses
at the discourse level. This is a striking example of the exploitive nature of the discourse
marking mechanism within languages.
While I have examined a wide range of elements that I have analyzed as discourse
markers in Ojibwe, more research is necessary in order to determine the full range of uses
for each marker described in this thesis. A whole paper could be devoted to the
exposition of each one of these markers, and it is hoped that further research will either
confirm, or provide further elaboration (or even corrections) on the various functions and
meanings that I have described here. One of the difficulties that I encountered in
describing the various functions of Ojibwe discourse markers is trying to reconcile the
seemingly unrelated functions that some of them have. For example, I have characterized
the particle mii as having various functions (e.g. deictic particle, aspectual marker,
veridical marker, and command softener) which, on the surface, do not appear to emanate
from a single underlying core function or meaning. Indeed, if such a core function
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