A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

internal evaluation, denoting main events, introducing central characters, highlighting key
descriptive details, framing and staging narratives, marking transitions between episodes,
distinguishing speakers, etc. (see Fleischman 1985, 1986 for Old French; Richardson
1991 for Middle English; Richardson 1995 for Old Norse, also Brinton 2003:143). The
preterit tense in Totonac (a Mesoamerican language) narratives, while indicating past
time and completed action in sentence grammars, serves a discourse function of marking
mainline events in narratives. This use of the preterit to mark eventlines in Totonac is
further contrasted by the use of other tense-aspects (such as the imperfect tense) to mark
non-eventline, supportive material (Bishop 1979). Conjunct mode verbs (which indicate
subordinate clauses in sentence grammars) in Kickapoo, an Algonquian language, are
used to mark eventlines, and may do the work of independent clauses at the discourse
level. This is surprising since conjunct verbs, rather than independent verbs, are utilized
in representing independent clauses at the discourse level. When conjunct verbs are used
in this fashion within discourse, independent verbs primarily mark background, setting,
participants, mental or emotional states, topic or participant prominence (Jones and
Coleman 1979). Such use of the conjunct verb has puzzled researchers, since while it
was known that conjunct verbs may do the work of the independent mode, it was not
understood why. 26 Jones and Coleman suggests that it is because the Algonquian
literature largely restricts study to isolated sentences. In regards to Kickapoo, in
particular, they state:
26
Rhodes noticed that in Ojibwe too, conjunct verbs may sometimes act as independent clauses, stating:
“This traditional characterization of verb forms as independent versus dependent can be quite misleading to
a non-Algonquianist syntactician because of the great variety of syntactic contexts in which dependently
inflectioned verbs appear, some of which are not obviously subordinate” (Rhodes 2006:6, a lecture
originally given in 1998 before the University of Manitoba).
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