A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

speaker), a reality that the speaker perceives as not being visible to interlocutors. Many
times, this revelation of reality has a relieving effect if the information that gosha is
accenting is found out to be contextually benign in nature where it was once thought to be
malignant. Also, while gosha is similar to sha in its revealing feature, it differs from sha
in that speakers do not use gosha to in order to censure interlocutors.
3.2.2.4 da
Mystery particle da is nicknamed here as the “clarification particle”, since it has a
clarifying function. When speakers use this particle, they are asking for information that
they missed in previous conversation. Its use is similar to the use of again in English for
the same function, e.g. What is your name again? Though da in Ojibwe and the use of
again in English have similar functions, their individual meanings are not the same, e.g.
da does not mean again in Ojibwe. It is the exacting, or clarifying, nature of da which
allows this reading. The clarifying function can be seen with these two examples. When
I asked one of the elders a question, she initially did not know that I was speaking to her.
Once she realized that I was, she uttered the question in (100b). The example in (100a)
gives the common interrogative form for what.
(101) Clarification particle da
a) Wegonen?
INTER
‘What?’
170