Abstract

This thesis is a description of four-word elaborate expressions in White Hmong, a Hmong-Mienh language spoken in the northern mountains of Southeast Asia. The goal of this work is to describe the behavior, characteristics, and functions of the expressions using data from the White Hmong-English Dictionary (Heimbach 1980). A native speaker helped find 318 examples of elaborate expressions in the dictionary. Elaborate expressions have previously been described as "a balanced group of four words in which the first and third element, and the second and fourth element, are either identical to each other or share a common meaning and often also a common sound" (Jarkey 2010:129). Previous work on elaborate expressions is limited to a full analysis of the Green dialect (Mortensen 2003) and a partial analysis focusing mainly on wordhood in White Hmong (White 2020). After introducing White Hmong and elaborate expressions in chapter 1, I use numerous examples to describe and support the types of concord presented in the analysis. The data is taken from the White Hmong-English Dictionary, which is composed of over 400 pages of definitions with detailed example sentences. Throughout the thesis I offer an analysis based on a previous framework of elaborate expressions depicted in the Green Hmong dialect (Mortensen 2003) to conclude that elaborate expressions offer three types of concord between their parts, namely part of speech, semantic, and phonological.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; Linguistics

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