Tibeto-Burman grammar is quite different from that of Indo-European languages, yet it shares many characteristics with the grammars of other language families of East and Southeast Asia. Tibeto-Burman languages are topic prominent, meaning that noun phrases (NPs) can be freely topicalized, or moved to initial position in the clause. Further, the NPs of a clause occur in relatively free order, especially in the verb-final languages. The Lahu sentence in the table consists of a verb phrase (VP) preceded by four NPs (several orderings other than the one given there are possible).

Click Here to see full-size tableThe noun phrases in this sentence include a temporal NP (yàʔ-ni ɔ̄ ‘today’), a subject (ŋà-hı̵ tê qhâʔ ‘our village’), a locative NP (qhɔ̀-phɔ̂ ‘where’), and an object (šā ‘animal[s]’). The VP consists of a main verb (γàʔ ‘hunt’) preceded by an auxiliary verb (ca ‘go and do’) and followed by several particles (e ‘direction away,’ tù ‘future; irrealis,’ and le ‘substance question’). The verb phrase is the dominant constituent in the clause, and sentences frequently lack “subjects.”

In fact, the notions of subject and object are alien to Tibeto-Burman grammar, as are such grammatical categories as active versus passive voice. Many Tibeto-Burman languages, including Tibetan, Newari, and Akha, are ergative with agents marked like instrumentals. Ergative languages treat the subject of intransitive verbs the same as the objects of transitive ones, unlike accusative languages, which treat the subjects of all verbs in the same way but as distinct from the objects of transitive verbs. Languages of the split ergative type (for example, Limbu and Sherpa) are ergative only in certain tenses and aspects (e.g., only in the past tense or completive aspect).

Tibeto-Burman languages have a penchant for nominalizing whole sentences without embedding them into any larger unit, typically via a particle that is also used in the citation-form of verbs and that has a relative or genitive function in other constructions. (Nominalization refers to the derivation of nounlike structures from verbal ones.) The connection between nominalization and relativization is often made explicit by using the same particle for both functions, as in Jingpo ʔai and Lahu ve.

Aspect (not tense) is the major verbal category, so notions such as completed action, change of state, irrealis, inchoative (or imminent action), and durative are encoded more readily than past, present, and future. The most satisfactory criterion for establishing that a Sino-Tibetan word is a verb is its negatability. Most words that translate as English adjectives are actually only a subclass of verbs, as in Burmese θwâ ‘go’ > mə-θwâ ‘not go’ and kâuN ‘be good’ > mə-kâuN ‘not be good.’

In order to express abstract grammatical relationships, the isolating languages of the Tibeto-Burman area have typically resorted to the specialization of full nouns and verbs. Verbs meaning ‘give,’ ‘dwell,’ ‘put,’ and ‘finish’ become bleached semantically until they can serve as markers of verbal categories such as causative, progressive, durative, and completive, respectively. A noun meaning ‘road’ might become a locative particle while another meaning ‘top part’ turns into an accusative marker (a particle indicating ‘[an action] that covers [a noun]’). Often a root morpheme that has undergone this or other forms of grammatical specialization acquires a distinctive phonological shape, usually via destressing, and sometimes assumes a special tone. In Lahu, for instance, the verb là ‘come’ has a low-falling tone but acquires mid-tone (la) as it becomes a particle indicating ‘motion toward’ and high-falling tone (lâ) as a particle signalling ‘non-third-person beneficiary.’

Verb concatenation is especially striking in the Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman. Lahu may juxtapose up to five verbs in a row in a single VP, with one verb serving as semantic head while the others are grammaticalized or made more abstract to modify it, as in γa qɔ̀ʔ yù tɔ̂ʔ pî ‘have to take it out for him again’ (literally “obtain-return-take-emerge-give”). In Chinese and Sinospheric SVO languages such as Thai, Hmong, Mien, and Vietnamese, verbs are grammatically transformed into NP markers that function like Indo-European prepositions. Thus, “He cut the sugarcane with a knife” is literally “He use knife cut sugarcane.”

Some languages (e.g., Akha, Newar) have intricate systems of evidential particles that characterize the nature of the speaker’s information, revealing if it is firsthand, hearsay, visual, or auditory. It is typical to have large repertoires of sentence-final particles that express emotional attitudes. These often occur in strings of two, three, or more and are more integrated intonationally into sentences than, for example, English interjections such as wow!. In some measure these fully syllabic emotional morphemes serve the same function as intonation does in nontonal languages.

The lack of gender or number markers on Tibeto-Burman nouns is somewhat compensated for by numeral classifiers, which serve to individuate nouns and may be said to “agree” with particular classes of nouns, such as flat, round, or elongated objects. Another characteristic way of lending phonological and semantic substance to monosyllabic morphemes is via the morphological process of elaboration, which creates redundant (sometimes poetic) four-syllable expressions, of which the first and third, or second and fourth, syllables are often identical. This kind of elaboration is widespread, as in Lahu thī-ŋə̄-thī-khâ ‘silver and gold altars,’ Burmese cit-hrañ-lak-hrañ ‘patiently’ (literally “mind-long-hand-long”), and Tibetan blo-gsal-lag-bde ‘intelligent, skillful’ (“mind-bright-hand-apt”).

Grammatical categories are generally expressed syntactically rather than by inflection in most TB languages, though both Kuki-Chin and Himalayish have considerable verbal morphology. Verbs in Chin languages such as Mizo, Lai, and Tiddim typically have two forms, with complex distribution patterns. In Lai, for instance, Form I occurs mostly in independent clauses and Form II mostly in subordinate ones, but with many complications (e.g., kaap (I) / kaʔ (II) ‘shoot’; toŋ (I) / ton (II) ‘meet’; hniim (I) / hniʔm (II) ‘smell’). Verbs in Written Tibetan may have as many as four principal parts, with at least a dozen different patterns of morphophonemic alternation, sometimes involving only the addition of prefixes and/or suffixes, as with gsig ‘shake’ (present), bsigs (past), bsig (future), sig (imperative). Sometimes vowel ablaut is also used: gsod ‘kill’ (present), bsad (past and future), sod (imperative).

Most complex of all are the agreement systems found in pronominalized languages such as Jingpo, or within the Kiranti group of eastern Nepal, where the person (including first- and second-person inclusive and exclusive) and number (including dual) of subject and/or object may be marked on the verb. This produces agreement systems that are sometimes relatively simple but that sometimes rival a language family such as Algonquian in complexity. Thus, Jingpo has conjugations such as ŋai sa na ǹ-ŋai ‘I will go,’ naŋ sa na ǹ-dai ‘you will go,’ and ši sa na rà-ʔai ‘he will go’ (sa ‘go,’ na ‘future particle’). It remains to be seen whether such systems should be posited for Proto-Tibeto-Burman or whether (as seems more likely) they have arisen independently in the various branches of the family.

Many TB languages have a morphological distinction between plain and causative verbs, signalled either by different prefixes, as in Written Tibetan mnam ‘have a smell’ and snam ‘smell something,’ or by secondary differences in manner of the initial consonant and/or tone, as in Written Burmese nûi ‘awaken’ (intransitive verb) and hnûi ‘wake someone’ (transitive verb) or Lahu vàʔ ‘hide oneself’ and fá ‘hide something.’