A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

speaker to exert and validate the Indian way of handling knowledge. In other words, the
nuance which isa allows to be displayed might be equivalent to the following: They have
their way and we have our own. Let them do it their way, and we’ll do it our way which
is a perfectly legimate way of doing it.
3.2.2.1.6 isa as a place holder
Some minor uses of sa appear to be as CONTINUERS, or as place holders, a function
similar to the marker uh in English. 58 Used in this way, sa functions to maintain the floor
for the speaker, allowing the speaker to continue their story in preparation for upcoming
talk. Many times, pauses or very slight pauses occur after sa (but not always) and do not
exhibit sentence-final intonation. The evidence that these usages are narrative continuers
is evinced by their high frequency in stories which are being made up on the spot, as
opposed to narratives based upon real life events whose details are not being fabricated as
the story goes on. For example, most of the stories I have collected for this thesis
average zero to five occurrences of sa per story. In one story which was completely
made up on the spot, a total of eleven occurrences of sa appeared. Also, in the Gilfillan
letters (from the 1800s), Reverend Gilfillan usually glossed sa as ‘rest voice’. While this
is not its only function (and this gloss may have been used over productively), it is a
function that speakers are consciously aware of. A few examples of this usage should
suffice. Commas in these examples represent significant pauses in the narrative by the
speaker.
58
I am, of course, not suggesting that sa and uh are equivalent in every way. Uh in English has other
functions too which sa does not appear to parallel, e.g. Uh….yes. Here, with continuing tone on yes, uh
signals that the answer provided should be obvious to the interlocutor, but for some reason isn’t.
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