The Sora (Saora, Savara) of Orissa, India, speak a language of the south Munda branch of the
Austroasiatic family. Sora songs, including ritual invocations, resemble many south and southeast
Asian cultures in being built entirely out of pairs of parallel phrases. But most unusually, the use of
parallel phrasing extends far into the prose of ordinary conversation. I shall approach the
implications of this by examining Sora dialogues with the dead, who speak through the mouth of
female shamans in trance. These are probably the most elaborate communication between living
and dead ever documented anywhere in the world. They constitute the most emotionally intense
speech situation in Sora life and I shall suggest that they are also related to the frequency of parallel
phrases in all everyday speech.

After setting out the formal properties of parallel phrases and their double lexicon, I shall explore
the relationship between the parts of a ritual which are set in verse and in free prose. The formulaic
verse invocations which summon the spirits establish a generic situation; by contrast, once a spirit
has arrived the prose dialogue is highly specific. Each living participant must speak for themselves
and defend themselves against the accusations of the dead and the illnesses which they send.

The use of parallel phrases in dialogues with the dead will emerge as having two main functions.
One is as a marker of heightened emotion and greater urgency to persuade; the other by contrast is
to make intense situations less specific and more generic. Armed with this knowledge, we can see
that parallel phrasing also performs these functions in the most everyday speech, possibly even
down to the level of baby-talk. This will allow us to ask (if not to answer) whether parallel phrasing
in prose would be better understood as broken-off fragments of verse or as the generative germs
from which full verse forms grow.