Outline of Bra‘go Variety of rTa’u (Horpa)

Submission note: A thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Department of Languages and Linguistics, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia.

This thesis is a descriptive grammar of the Brag mda’ (Zhangda) speech variety of rTa’u (Daofu), a Tibeto-Burman language of the rGyalrongic branch spoken mainly in rTa’u County of Dkar mdzes (Ganzi) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuān province in Southwest China. It is based on a large corpus of primary data collected during two fieldwork trips in 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 by the author. Most sentence examples are given by the author as he is a native speaker of the rTa’u language himself. The thesis presents a phonological and grammatical description of the language and includes three fully analysed interlinear texts in the appendix.