Kerbs Richard. A descriptive grammar of Sgaw Karen

University of Helsinki, 2025. — 444 p.This thesis presents a grammatical description of Sgaw Karen, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken mainly along the border between Myanmar and Thailand, in Southwestern Myanmar, and in the Andaman Islands, as well as overseas in Europe, North America, and Australia. The corpus of data used for the thesis combines primary data collected by the researcher and secondary data collected by other scholars. The primary data comes from speakers representing three different regions: (1) Mawchi–Taungoo, Myanmar, (2) Kayin–Tak (Tak Province in northwestern Thailand, near the border of Kayin State, Myanmar), and (3) Northern Thailand (Mae Hong Son Province). Rather than focusing on one data set, the dissertation considers all collected data and indicates regional variation where applicable. The data is analysed within a functional–typological framework known as Basic Linguistic Theory, a set of functionally-oriented comparative concepts based on extensive previous typological research.