A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

The little girl in this story was told by her grandmother to melt some snow and soak a
deer hide in it. Not ever having done this before, or ever having watched her
grandmother do it, she melted the snow to a boil and threw the hide in, shrinking and
ruining the hide. At the time, the little girl had no idea what was happening to the hide,
and why it was shrinking. By accenting her utterances with naa, she distances herself
from the event, as a way to avoid responsibility, as she did not know any better, nor was
she instructed as to the correct manner in which to soak a hide. In (115c), the speaker
uses naa to express the feeling I don’t know how, but it shrank, or somehow it shrank.
In (115e), naa expresses that the speaker cannot explain what is happening and is in
effect saying I wonder what is happening. In (115f), the speaker uses naa to distance
herself from the event when revealing to the incident to her grandmother. In a way, what
the speaker appears to be saying when using naa is I don’t know how, but the hide
shrank.
As the example in (115e) suggests above, there are times when speakers are baffled
about a situation, and are searching for an answer to what it is that is baffling them. This
usage is still a hedge, since the speaker is still distancing themselves, not from the
question or proposition, but from the answer. When used in this way, I sometimes like to
call naa the WONDER PARTICLE, since this is what speakers are doing when they use naa
in such cases. This can be seen in the following example where a little girl steals fry
bread in order to give it to a man that she is quite afraid of (as he was always teasing her
by saying that he was going to eat her up and that he will marry her when she grows up).
The women cooking the bread realize that they are missing bread and say the following
utterance, accenting it with naa.
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