Word in Hmong

Hmong (Hmong-Mien; Laos and diaspora) possesses categories of both phonological word and grammatical word. Phonological words exhibit a prosodic prominence in certain pragmatic situations combined with a lack of pauses within the word, and a minimal consonant-vowel-tone structure of a syllable serves as a minor third criterion. Grammatical words exhibit grammatical cohesion of two types—isolability, where words can appear alone in their domain, and the absence of separability, where components of a word cannot be separated—and serve as the domain for reduplication and lexical tone melody alternations. Given a category of grammatical wordhood, affixes and compounds can be recognized in Hmong, and coordinate compounds and four-syllable elaborate expressions can be distinguished as set expressions and templatic constructions, respectively. Hmong attests mismatches between phonological and grammatical word, which include the presence of clitics and cliticization in casual speech at a moderate rate of speed, and varying arrangements of grammatical words in four-syllable elaborate expressions.