A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

wants to express the equivalent of damn it). This could easily be the case since the
women cooking fry bread do not want dogs taking their fry bread and could be saying, in
effect: There aren’t damn dogs here, are there? There is evidence, however, that naa in
this case is indeed the wonder particle (i.e. a function as a hedge). In the following
example, naa appears in an utterance where the speaker is baffled about something, and
as a result is wondering what it going on. A young girl has acquired about twenty mud
turtles that were taken off the lake for her. They were frozen and so she had piled them
up outside. She took a kettle and put the frozen mud turtles in there to boil them. As a
result of the warming water, the mud turtles begin to move. It is when she saw the mud
turtles start to move that she made the following utterance, accenting it with naa.
(117) naa as a wonder particle (Kegg 1991:164-165)
a) Mashkawaakwajiwag.
they are frozen
b) Gaawiin mamaajiisiiwag, biina’wagwaa miskwaadesiwag, mii imaa akikong.
not they are not moving I put them in mud turtles DP there in the kettle
c) Mii go naa-sh mamaajiiwaad, ganawaabamagwaa.
DP EMPH DM-DM they are moving I watch them
b) “Aaniin ezhiwebiziwaad?”
what what is wrong with them
a) ‘They were frozen.
b) Those turtles weren’t moving when I put them in the kettle.
c) As I watched them, they started [naa] moving.
d) “What’s happening to them?”’
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