A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

“it would have been impossible to analyze these functions of Kickapoo
modes and tenses without a discourse perspective. We believe this is why
many of these functions have been heretofore unnoticed in Algonquian
languages, at least in the published literature, since much of the published
material has been based on the study of isolated sentences, whether isolated
due to elicitation technique or due to their extraction from texts.”
Because the heavy use of conjunct verbs in discourse is also a feature of Ojibwe, this will
also be discussed in the body of this thesis. What this means in general, however, is that
while individual lexical items (i.e. traditional discourse markers) which have sentence
level functions may be targeted for work above the sentence level, tense-aspect-mode
systems which have specific sentence level functions which would lend themselves for
discourse work may also be targeted. In the case of TAM forms, it is not the word itself
which lends itself for discourse work, but its shape.
2.3.4 Simultaneous textual and interpersonal functions of discourse markers
Recall that both Schiffrin and Brinton recognize the two-fold function of discourse
markers, in that, there are those which contribute to the textual mode of a language, and
those which contribute to the interpersonal mode of language (Brinton 1996:38, Schiffrin
2003:459). To my knowledge, neither researcher has explicitly claimed that a discourse
marker could function in both a textual (connective) and interpersonal (epistemic or
epistemic) function simultaneously. By ‘simultaneous’, I do not mean to refer to the
multifunctional feature of discourse markers which refers to the ability of discourse
markers to anchor units of talk to various planes of discourse, since both textual and
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