In Relativization in Ojibwe, Michael D. Sullivan Sr. compares
varieties of the Ojibwe language and establishes subdialect
groupings for Southwestern Ojibwe, often referred to as Chippewa,
of the Algonquian family. Drawing from a vast corpus of both
primary and archived sources, he presents an overview of two
strategies of relative clause formation and shows that
relativization appears to be an exemplary parameter for grouping
Ojibwe dialect and subdialect relationships. Specifically, Sullivan
targets the morphological composition of participial verbs in
Algonquian parlance and categorizes the variation of their form
across a number of communities. In addition to the discussion of
participles and their role in relative clauses, he presents
original research linking 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 previous dialect studies concerned primarily
with varieties of Ojibwe spoken in Canada, Relativization in Ojibwe
presents the first study of dialect variation for varieties spoken
in the United States and along the border region of Ontario and
Minnesota. Starting with a classic Algonquian linguistic tradition,
Sullivan then recasts the data in a modern theoretical framework,
using previous theories for Algonquian languages and familiar
approaches such as feature checking and the split-CP hypothesis.