A grammar of Lhowa

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This grammar, framed within an adaptive approach, analyzes phonological and grammatical codes in Lhowa, a southern Tibetic language, and compares them with Lhasa Tibetan and other Central Bodish languages from a typological perspective. Lhowa is a tonal language featuring high-front and mid-front rounded vowels, murmured plosives, and voiceless lateral sounds. It is typologically agglutinating and consistently ergative, with nouns unmarked for grammatical gender and number. However, they are marked for three numbers (singular, dual, plural) and twelve case roles. Personal pronouns in Lhowa reflect social standing (ordinary vs. honorific) and clusivity (inclusive vs. exclusive) in the first person plural. Adjectives, numerals, and quantifiers follow nouns, while demonstratives and possessive pronouns precede them. Tense markers in Lhowa interact with aspect, modality, and evidentiality, and the verb agreement system relates closely to the conjunct-disjunct distinction. Egophoricity, which marks the first person in the past tense, is governed by volitionality and is also evident in essential and existential copulas. Tense is inferred from the text's context. Lhowa, a dependent marking and highly nominalizing language, features a non-promotional type of passive. While sharing phonological and grammatical coding devices with Lhasa Tibetan and the gTsang cluster, Lhowa also shows contact-induced changes not found in its counterpart