Relativization in Ojibwe

Abstract

In this dissertation, I compare varieties of Ojibwe and establish sub-dialect groupings for the larger grouping known as Southwestern Ojibwe, often referred to as Chippewa, an indigenous North American Indian language of the Algonquian family. Drawing from a vast corpus of both primary and archived sources, I present an overview of two strategies of relative clause formation and show that relativization appears to be an exemplary parameter in the grouping of Ojibwe dialect and sub-dialect relationships. Specifically, I target the morphological composition of participial verbs, known as participles in Algonquian parlance and show the variation of their form across a number of communities. In addition to the discussion of participles and their role in relative clauses, I present additional findings from my research, some of which seem to correlate with the geographical distribution of participles, most likely a result of historic movements of the Ojibwe people to their present location in the northern Midwestern region of North America. Following up on the previous dialect studies of Ojibwe primarily concerned with varieties of Ojibwe spoken in Canada (Nichols 1976; Rhodes and Todd 1981; Valentine 1994, to name a few), I present the first study of dialect variation for varieties spoken in the United States and along the border region of Ontario and Minnesota. By describing the data in a classic Algonquian linguistic tradition, I then recast the data in a modern theoretical framework, making use of previous theories for Algonquian languages (Bruening 2001; Brittain 2001) and familiar approaches such as feature checking (Chomsky 1993) and the Split CP Hypothesis (Rizzi 1997).