Hmong Elaborate Expressions are Coordinate Compounds

On exposure to Hmong discourse1 discourse, or that of many other structurally-similar Southeast Asian languages—the speaker of English can hardly help but be impressed by the pervasiveness of parallelism in this discourse tradition. Almost everything seems to be repeated, often in balanced pairs. Of course, parallelism in language is by no means confined to Southeast Asia—as a stylistic device it is ubiquitous. However, in Hmong at least, it is hard to escape the conclusion that parallelism plays a greater role in the grammatical structure of the language than it does in English. In addition to the usual types of stylistic parallelism, Hmong features an impressive array of symmetrical grammatical structures. Of particular interest in this regard are two morphological constructions: headless coordinate compounds consisting of pairs of synonyms, nearsynonyms, antonyms, and converses like caij-nyoog ‘time-time’ (‘time’), num-tswv ‘official-lord’ (‘leader’), and muag-nug ‘sister-brother’ (‘brother and sister’); and socalled elaborate expressions—parallel expressions superficially like the English idioms easy-come easy-go and like father like son. In this latter category are compounds like