A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

speakers to speak about topics without totally committing to their correctness, or without
having to explain how an event came to be. A good example of this is shown by the
following utterance made by one of my consultants at one of our weekly meetings. After
making a guess on how to spell a word, she immediately said the following utterance,
accenting it with naa.
(112) naa as a hedge
Ganabaj naa.
probably DM
‘Probably I guess.’
Because ganabaj ‘probably’ is somewhat of a hedge itself, it may be difficult to parse out
the contribution that naa is making in this example. My consultants, however, feel that
of the following two examples, the one with naa is the weaker statement, showing that
the speaker is not fully committed or sure about the verity of the proposition of its
containing clause.
(113) naa (Mille Lacs Sessions)
a) Ganabaj niimi.
probably dance
‘He’s probably dancing.’
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