A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

The use of dibishkoo in both examples above shows that the speakers are reformulating
prior discourse in order to make it more clear, or meaningful. For example, in (42a), the
speaker implies that he left the reservation by the use of the expression opime-ayi’ii gii-
izhaayaan ‘(lit.) when I went to the side of it’. By the use of dibishkoo, the speaker then
makes it clear what he meant by this implicit statement, i.e. that he was going around
looking for ways to support himself. This same sort of reformulation can be seen in
(42b). There, the speaker describes an old man’s journeys throughout the course of a
day. This description is then reformulated with the phrase dibishkoo sa go washki-giiwe
‘just like a round trip’. What is particularly interesting about this example is that there is
another word specifically meaning ‘round trip’: biskaabii. The question here is why
didn’t the speaker just use the word biskaabii rather than washki-giiwe, which literally
means ‘turns and goes home’? The answer, I suggest, is that the use of dibishkoo in
discourse is to reformulate in order to clarify. The use of dibishkoo allows the speaker to
describe exactly what is going on, rather than just providing the name for the old man’s
day journeys.
So, while dibishkoo could be thought of as an equals sign within sentence grammars,
e.g. NP is just like NP, this core function is active at the discourse level as well. At the
discourse level, however, its function is not to show equivalence per se, but to allow the
speaker to clarify or flesh out prior discourse in order to make that prior discourse more
clear. In this way, dibishkoo textually brackets upcoming discourse in order to
reformulate prior discourse.
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