A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

) Daga naa bi-naazhishin!
please DM come get me
‘Come on, please come get me!’
The basic imperative force of the carrier imperative expression in (121) is please come
and get me!, but naa in (121b) contributes an emotional tug on the interlocutor. It
increases the overall emotional urgency of the situation, allowing the speaker to increase
the urgency of their pleading. In other words, naa amplifies the function of its
surrounding content, here, an imperative expression. When used in this manner, mystery
particle naa is a general amplifier marker, having the function of amplifying the functions
of its containing clauses, the situational emotional statue, or other discourse markers. As
we will see, when it occurs with other discourse markers within clusters, it amplifies the
individual functions of those markers.
3.2.2.7.3.1 Second position discourse clusters with naa
The mystery particle naa appears frequently in various combinations of clusters, e.g.
da naa, sha naa, bina naa, sa naa. In these clusters, naa always appears last in the
combination, i.e. as the second or third particle in the cluster depending on whether there
is an intervening emphatic particle, such as go. Therefore, the following combinations
are unattested: *naa da, *naa sha, *naa sa, *naa bina, though each may appear
individually within utterances.
Both da naa and sha naa have similar functions. They have a meaning similar to the
English expression damn it or [what] the hell, but without the stigma of swear words.
What this means is that though both combinations da naa and sha naa have the semantic
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