A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

) Discourse unit #2: consequent proposition – they consequently die
then he died
miinawaa one of their children died there
miinawaa the old man died
What is striking about this example is that it also contains a sentence level usage of
miinawaa in (32f above) where it coordinates two noun phrases, old man and old woman,
i.e. akiwenzii ... miinawaa mindimooyenh ‘an old man … and old woman. What this
ultimately shows is that miinawaa, like the English discourse marker and, is
multifunctional (i.e. functioning on more than one plane of discourse), since it may work
at the sentence level coordinating two nouns, but also may operate at both local levels
(i.e. adjacent units) and global levels (i.e. across wider spans of discourse) of discourse in
order to create textual coherence.
While miinawaa may act as a discourse coordinator much like its English
counterpart and, there are differences. For example, Schiffrin has shown that the English
marker and may work locally, globally, or at both levels (Schiffrin 1987:138-141). In
other words, and may link events associated with individual discourse topics on a local
level, and it may also link discourse topics. This structure would look like the following,
where and coordinates the two topics, TOPIC 1 and TOPIC 2, and also coordinates the local
events associated with each of those topics.
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