Word order in Sino-Tibetan languages from a typological and geographical perspective

Word order, both at the clause level and even more at the phrase level, varies among Sino-Tibetan languages. In this chapter, I describe some of this variation and examine it in the light of word order tendencies found among the languages of the world as a whole. In section 2, I briefl y summarize some of the variation in word order within Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages, and discuss what features of word order in these languages are typical and atypical. In section 3, I discuss word order in Chinese, identifying some typologically unusual features and discussing possible explanations for them. An overall theme shared by the two sections is that word order in Sino-Tibetan is best understood in an areal context.