A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

c) (Eagle 1998:18, audio)
Wa’aw gimiinin asemaa ji-maanenimigoyan gidoonji-baapi’isinoon.
this I give you tobacco so you won’t feel bad because I wasn’t laughing at you
‘Here’s some tobacco so you won’t feel bad because I wasn’t laughing at you.’
d) (Kegg 1991:114-115)
Mii gaa-onji-gosag, “Ingitigaan” gii-izhid.
that why I was scared of him my garden he told me
‘I was really scared of him because he said “Ingitigaan ‘my garden’” to me.’
In (40a,b), there is no one word which means ‘because’; rather, it is the arrangement of
clauses and context which allows a causal relationship. In other words, causality is
pragmatically inferred. For both examples in (40c,d), it is the use of the relative root
onji- which allows a causation interpretation. The fact that onzaam is non-obligatory is
not surprising, since discourse markers are commonly said to be “non-obligatory
utterance-initial items that function in relation to ongoing talk and text” (Schiffrin
2001:57). The fact that other linguistic devices may do the work that onzaam does is not
surprising as well, since, as Schiffrin argues for English, discourse work may be
accomplished by other linguistic devices, such as lexical repetition, reiteration, thematic
continuity on the local levels (clause to clause), meta-linguistic phrases, and syntactic
parallels (Schiffrin 1987:57-59). Here, it is asyndetic and grammatical devices which do
the work that onzaam may optionally perform as a discourse marker.
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