A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

2.3.2 Clitics and affixes
As it turns out, there is a significant amount of literature which speaks to the various
discourse features of many indigenous languages of the Americas (literature existing at
the time of Schiffrin’s analysis) which shows that the word classes from which discourse
markers are drawn must also be expanded to include CLITICS and AFFIXES (see Brody
1989 who first made this point). For example, in Tojolab'al Mayan, Brody not only
identified discourse markers of the type described by Schiffrin (i.e. syntactically detached
items such as ti ‘when’, entonse ‘then, pwes/pwe/pes/pe ‘well’, este ‘um’, etc.), but also
those which occur as clitics, e.g. -xa ‘now’, -ta ‘already’, -to ‘still, -xta ‘durative’,
cha/cho ‘repetitive’, as well as utterance-final clitics such as -tak ‘emphasis, anyway’, -
b’a ‘contrast, emphasis’, -ye7/ye7n ‘emphasis, anyway’. In Huichol, an indigenous
language of western central Mexico, Grimes reveals that “both words like mérí+kʌʌte
‘well, then’ and postfixes (suffix-like forms that follow enclitics) like -ríi ‘definitely’”
(Grimes 1975:93) have functions in discourse. For the Ecuadorian language Cayapa, and
the Columbian languages Cubeo, Inga, Guajiro, and Ica, Longacre shows that both
particles and affixes may serve as discourse markers, since they are “found to have a
function which relates to a unit larger than the sentence, i.e., to the paragraph and the
discourse” (Longacre 1976:468). In these languages, both particles and affixes which are
used as discourse markers have largely a common function in marking the main
characters and the main actions (or main eventlines) of stories and narratives. For one of
these particles, ˈcari, for example, Longacre states that “if one copies out all the sentences
from a discourse which have this particle within them, one gets a tolerably good abstract
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