A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

a) ‘A girl and her grandmother were going to the store.
b) On the way, they stopped off at a neighbor’s house.
c) The girl’s grandmother asked the neighbor, “What are you doing?”
d) I’m hanging up my pants.”
e) Some time later after they had left there, the girl says, “Could it be that those
pants of hers are alive?”
f) “No, that’s [gosha] just the way that these Indians speak around here.”’
Within the context of this story, the grandmother is not deriding her granddaughter for
her faulty logic, but merely revealing the fact that the dialect spoken by her friend refers
to pants (grammatically speaking) as being alive. In English, the revealing of such
information is usually accomplished by the use of the word just accompanied by a special
intonation contour which marks such revealed information, i.e. rising intonation over
that’s and speak within the phrase that’s just the way that these Indians speak around
here. As already noted earlier, Ojibwe does not use intonation contours in the way that
English does. This becomes quickly evident when listening to an Ojibwe narration. The
intonation contours within the narrative remain quite flat throughout the whole discourse,
while English discourse shows a rich use of stress and intonation contours in order to
produce a number of nuances. Given these facts, it is not surprising that Ojibwe would
use discourse markers, such as gosha in this case, in order to mark such revealed
information.
In short, gosha makes its appearances in situations where speakers want to make a
revelation that is somehow significant or relevant in the situation at hand. The
information that is revealed by speakers is usually information which, once revealed,
makes the situation more clear to interlocutors. Another way of saying this is that gosha
allows speakers to provide or interject the reality of a situation (as seen in the eyes of the
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