This dissertation is a description of Dongwang Tibetan. It is based on personal biographies, narratives and procedural texts, as well as on elicited material. Dongwang is a Southern Khams Tibetan dialect spoken in Shangri-la County, Diqing Prefecture, Yunnan. There are about 6,000 speakers of Dongwang who live in fifty-seven villages that are scattered on the steep hillsides along both sides of the Dongwang River.;After an introductory chapter, a synchronic and diachronic description of the phonology is given. The synchronic section examines the segments, syllable canon and tone of Dongwang. The diachronic section focuses on comparing older forms of Tibetan, as reflected in Written Tibetan, with Dongwang speech in order to highlight the historical origins and development of Dongwang forms.;Word classes including nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are described in Chapters Three through Six. Special attention is given to how new nouns are inducted into Dongwang and the various morphological processes required to do so. The semantic and pragmatic categories that typify verbs are described in Chapter Four with special attention given to categories of control, transitivity and intention. Two types of adjectives are described in Chapter Six as well as the semantic categories that adjectives depict.;Constituent order and nominal morphology is discussed in Chapter Eight, in which the morphosyntactic organization of core arguments is described along with other casemarking clitics. Chapters Nine and Ten describe the verb phrase, focusing on pre-verbal and post-verbal elements and issues of grammaticization which typify the secondary verbs in Dongwang. Intention, evidentiality, and validationality are some of the issues contained in the discussion of final auxiliaries.;Chapter Eleven describes simple clause types in Dongwang and Chapter Twelve discusses combinations of clauses such as relative clauses, complement clauses and clause chains.
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