ABSTRACT
Word order, both at the clause level and even more at the phrase level, varies among Sino-Tibetan languages. In this Chapter, I describe some of this variation and examine it in the light of word order tendencies found among the languages of the world as a whole. In Section 1, I briefly summarize some of the variation in word order within Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages, and discuss what features of word order in these languages are typical and atypical. In Section 2, I discuss word order in Chinese, identifying some typological unusual features and discussing possible explanations for them. An overall theme shared by the two sections is that word order in Sino-Tibetan is best understood in an areal context.
