Book excerpt: This monograph lays the foundation for a prosodological theory of Tibeto-Burman languages within a comparative and reconstructional framework. It is primarily based on data collections of mostly unknown languages on which the author worked for more than 10 years on several projects. This comparative study of tonology represents a significant contribution not only to the historical-comparative study of Tibeto-Burman, but also to the larger field of linguistic theory, especially now that the subject increasingly begins to be approached along diachronic lines. With this in mind, it is hoped that this work will provoke future research in the field.