A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE ...

than searching for information. Here, one of my consultants said the utterance in (122b)
showing her disappointment that even though it was the dead of winter (i.e. January), it
was too mild. In both cases, naa amplifies the respective functions of the individual
markers da and sha in order to increase the overall emotional state of the situation.
Cluster sha naa also appears in a story about a little girl and her grandma who were
traveling to go weed a garden for someone, further showing naa’s emotional
amplification function. On the way to their destination, they got hungry. They then saw
a duck, killed it, plucked it, built a fire, and then singed it. After all this work and effort,
they realize they had no knife to clean it with, to which the following phrase was uttered
by her grandmother.
(123) sha naa (Kegg 1991:76-77)
“Oo, yay, gaawiin sha naa gegoo mookomaan gibimiwidoosiimin,” ikido.
oh no not DM DM something knife we do not bring it along she says
‘“Oh no, we haven’t [sha naa] even got a knife along,” she said.’
Although the translation does not capture the discourse cluster usage, the interpretation
is: Oh no, we didn’t bring along a knife damn it. This interpretation is also supported by
the fact that the situation was already in a heightened state of excitement, evinced by her
grandmother’s previous statement in regards to killing a duck: Oo, Naawakamigook, mii
ji-wiisiniyang ‘Oh, Naawakamigook, we’re going to eat’. As noted in Fairbanks 2008
(forthcoming), the use of a mii-clause in statements such as this is not random. In other
words, the Ojibwe speaker has two options in order to convey the proposition we’re
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