ABSTRACT
The hta verses were tape-recorded in March 1982 during a wedding in the Sgaw village Mu Ka Klo (Doi Inthanon massif, Chom Thong district of Chiang Mai Province). The use of hta seems to be culturally appropriate (and on certain occasions prescribed) whenever the subject matter to be expressed is of basic social importance or considered highly controversial or delicate. A conspicuous formal feature of Sgaw hta is that the majority of them consist of couplets, i.e. of pairs of parallel verses that are nearly identical. This technique of reduplicating whole verses is an extreme variety of a widespread linguistic phenomenon, often referred to in the literature as grammatical/stylistic ‘parallelism’ or ‘dyadic speech’. In terms of formal textual structure, nearly all of the 136 hta in the author's collection conform to a small set of strict rules. In fact their formal structure seems to be much more rigid than that of the traditional ‘dyadic’ poetry of eastern Indonesian cultures.
