A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

In (93d), Speaker C, not yet knowing her inadvertent error, reveals to the group that she
had just called the very person that Speaker B wanted to give a cradle board to and told
her of Speaker B’s plan to give the cradle board away as a birthday gift. In (93e), the
emotional state increases as the sentiment of Speaker B turns to disbelief, evident by her
response to the news, i.e. nooo!. In (93h), Speaker C realizes her error, and then in (93i),
makes the statement that she spilt the beans, accenting her statement with sha. The use of
sha in this example has the feeling of self-reproach and self-pity. In short, the speaker is
getting after herself for messing up the surprise.
As part of the general revealing feature of sha, there are occasions where speakers
will use sha in order to reveal and confront interlocutors with their (the interlocutor’s)
faulty logic evinced by their (the interlocutor’s) actions or utterances. In other words,
speakers may use sha to throw the interlocutor’s faulty logic in the face of interlocutors
as a way of showing them where they have gone wrong. What the speaker is revealing
with sha is the truth, or reality (as they see it), of a situation, which they view as not
apparent to interlocutors. In these situations, sha usually (but not always) occurs within a
second position cluster involving the emphatic marker igo (usually occurring as go), and
occasionally with the mystery pleading particle naa (to be discussed in Section 3.2.2.7).
This function is shown by the following interaction between my consultants. Once a
month at our meetings, the tradition was to have a potluck. At one of these potlucks, one
of my consultants noticed that there was fry bread, but no peanut butter. It was at this
point that he mentioned that he was allergic to peanut butter, but his very next step was to
call home to see if someone could bring some peanut butter to the meeting. After he got
off the phone, one of the other elders queried him about the apparent contradiction,
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