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Open Liver Open Lung: Elaborate Expressions In White Hmong, Luke Walker Packer

Theses and Dissertations

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 …