The Tibetic languages are all directly derived from Old Tibetan and are comparable in diversity to the Romance or Germanic languages (see Nicolas Tournadre, “The Tibetic languages and their classification”, in Thomas Owen-Smith and Nathan W. Hill (eds), Trans-Himalayan Linguistics: Historical and Descriptive Linguistics of the Himalayan Area, 9. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014, pp. 105–12). As a branch of Tibetic languages, Amdo Tibetan has always been regarded as containing a series of conservative morphological and syntactic features. However, aside from this book, only three reference grammars of Amdo Tibetan have been published so far (Wang Qingshan, 安多口语语法 A Grammar of Spoken Amdo Tibetan, Chengdu: Sichuan Nationality Publishing House, 1995; Felix Haller, Dialekt und Erzählungen von Themchen: sprachwissenschaftliche Beschreibung eines Nomadendialektes aus Nord-Amdo, Bonn: VGH Wissenschaftsverlag, 2004; and Shao Mingyuan, 河西走廊濒危藏语东纳话研究 (A study of endangered Dongnag Tibetan in Hexi Corridor), Guangzhou: Sun Yat-sen University Press, 2018). However, the first two of these are relatively simple and many grammatical features have not yet been described.
Based on the theoretical framework of reference grammars advocated by typologists, this book makes a detailed description of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Gonghe Tibetan in Amdo, Qinghai Province, China. Compared with Wang and Haller's works, it provides a more comprehensive description and covers a wider range of data, e.g. the inspiratory sound of marginal pronunciation (p. 21), the distinctions between spoken and literary pronunciation (chapter 2.7), complex sentences (chapter 8), the distribution of phonetic variation of affixes or clitics (pp. 343–7), the pragmatic functions of demonstrative pronouns (pp. 58–64), the semantics of directive auxiliary (pp. 283–90), etc., which are more detailed than before. Therefore, this is an essential reference book for Amdo Tibetan research.
However, the book contains many obvious deficiencies and should be read with caution. The author should note these improvements when revising the book for a new edition. The problems are outlined in what follows.
According to my fieldwork and the author's description, the syllable canon C2C1GV (e.g. /hpji/ “ape”, pp. 24, 28) containing complex initials with the palatalization marker /-j-/ would be better rewritten as /hpiʑ/ or /hpɿ/, as the rhyme is a frictional vowel. In fact, this phenomenon is pervasive in East Amdo Tibetan. In contrast, complex initials with three consonants are rare in Amdo Tibetan. In addition, a section of diachronic phonology on onsets and rhymes should be supplemented to chapter 2 since this would be helpful to scholars in understanding the process of historical sound changes.
When discussing case clitics, it is better to describe the case function and the non-case function separately instead of mixing them up, although the latter originates from the former, e.g. the dative marker /=ŋa/ in (354) and /=a/ in (355) have actually grammaticalized into adverbial affixes instead of case clitics, which serve totally different functions.
There are many deficiencies in the description of ego evidentiality. In chapter 7.31, the author attributes the copula <yin> to epistemic modality instead of ego evidentiality. This needs to be reconsidered as it is different from the generally accepted view (see Lauren Gawne, “Egophoric evidentiality in Bodish languages”, in Lauren Gawne and Nathan W. Hill (eds), Evidentiality in Tibetic languages, 61–94, Berlin and Boston: Mouton de Gruyter, 2017). Although epistemic modality and evidentiality are continuous in Tibetan, they are different categories in nature. Moreover, since the existential verb <yod> is regarded as an ego evidential marker, it is more reasonable to do so for the copula verb <yin>. The finite clauses ending with a bare verb in fact generally convey ego evidentiality encoded by the zero form Ø, which are lack of description and are not glossed in the corpus (see Zoe Tribur, “Observations on factors affecting the distributional properties of evidential markers in Amdo Tibetan”, in Gawne and Hill (eds), Evidentiality in Tibetic Languages, 367–421. In contrast, some words bearing no ego function are glossed by ego marker erroneously, e.g. /=go/ in (434) and /=taŋ/ in (435) are but auxiliaries indicating aspect. In addition, the copula verb <yin> is neutral in evidential function in infinite clauses, e.g. in (302), therefore it is not appropriate to gloss it as cop.s (copula+eso-) in this syntactic position.
The co-ordinate construction is mistakenly described as a complex construction in chapter 8. In (898) and (899), the function word /-ʈa/ is actually a co-ordinate conjunction rather than a subordinate conjunction since the clause it attaches to contains a finite verb instead of a non-finite verb. Besides, serial verb constructions, as a subcategory of complex clauses, should be described, which indeed present in Amdo Tibetan (Shao 2018: 303) but unfortunately are not fully elaborated in this book.
There are some obvious grammatical glossing errors, e.g. the morpheme /=ka/ (example 545), /=a/ (example 210) and /=na/ (example 524 and 525) are not all ego evidential markers, in which the clitic /=ka/ in (545) originates from the combination of the sensory evidential marker /=kə/ and the modal particle /=a/, and the rest are all modal particles. The morpheme /ra/ in (184) is a co-ordinate conjunction rather than a conversation particle. The converb clitic /=i/ in (427), (428), (432) and (433) should not be bracketed, because it is mandatory rather than optional to construct clause-chain construction.
There is some carelessness in judging the grammaticality of some examples, e.g. (682a) is a grammatical sentence, but (682b) is not; however, the author's observation is just the opposite. In table 21, the word /ə-ra/ should be corrected to /ə-re/, since /ra/ originates from the combination of the copula /rel/ and the modal particle /=a/ (/rel=a/＞/ra/), and it is ungrammatical for the question affix /ə-/ to co-exist with the interrogative particle /=a/ in Amdo Tibetan.
Some grammatical forms, which are considered absent in Gonghe Tibetan, are in fact ignored, e.g. the negative and interrogative form of the copula verb /jən/ in table 21 is /mən=na/. A similar phenomenon also appears in table 22, in which the negative and interrogative forms of the existential verb /jol/ are /me=la/ and /me=ka/, both distribute in Gonghe Tibetan.
Although the Leipzig Glossing Rules allow some flexibility, it is better to distinguish phonetic and morphophonemic glosses clearly and follow the rules consistently. However, the author does not make a good distinction between them, e.g. /jop=pa/ in (202) and /jol=a/ in (210); the former represents the phonetic, while the latter represents the morphophonemic layer.
The corpus of this book is basically derived from syntactic elicitation rather than immersive fieldwork. The defects of this method are obvious, including the unnaturalness of the data and the limitation in reflecting the real usage of Tibetan. Many important grammatical features are hard to elicit reliably and may even be ignored, e.g. Tibetan exhibit clause chaining, a phenomenon characterized by long strings of dependent clauses, which mainly appears in naturalistic corpus data. Subcategorizing this construction to adverbial clauses, the author fails fully to explain the morpho-syntactic features, such as switch-reference, finiteness, reality and so on, leading to inadequate description of this important grammatical phenomenon in Tibetan.
