A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

deictics and which attach to verbs) in support of the claim made for affixes. Such classes
are common features to Algonquian languages such as Ojibwe, and their description will
be provided in the body of this thesis.
2.3.3 TAM (tense-aspect-mode) systems
Perhaps another relevant dimension to this discussion is the use of tense-aspect
forms (i.e. inflectional morphology) in discourse, or in marking discourse. Brinton notes
that tense-aspect forms have been the subject of study by historical discourse analysts,
stating that “[t]ense-aspect morphology, because of its function in conceptualizing and
placing event in time, plays a special role in discourse structuring” (Brinton 2003:142).
What this essentially means is that it is not a particular lexical item which serves as a
discourse marker, per se, but the shape of the words themselves which give global
coherence. 25 Therefore, targets for discourse use are, essentially, entire verbal
inflectional paradigms. While I hesitate to call an entire paradigm a “discourse marker”
per se, it is undeniable that inflectional morphology may be utilized for discourse work in
the same way that individual linguistic items which have lexical or grammatical uses at
the sentence level are enlisted for work above the sentence level. In other words, TAM
forms which have specific functions at the sentence level such as tense, aspect, mood,
and temporality, for example, may have more global functions above the sentence level.
Such behavior is not new to the literature. The historical present (i.e. the use of the
present tense in a past tense narrative) in medieval texts, for example, has been argued to
serve various discourse roles, such as marking foregrounded events, as devices for
25
What I mean by “word shape” is a word might be changed in form by morphological or inflectional
processes.
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