Such languages have not been touched by literacy or any knowledge of writing and print, and are used only in spoken domains.

Bridging repetition, or tail-head linkage, is a common spoken phenomenon in procedural description and folklore narration of many lesser-known languages of the world. Its core feature is that an element of one clause, generally involving the predicate, is repeated verbatim in the following clause. Its pervasive use in continuous event line exhibits the pattern of [(A,) B]sentence 1[B, C]sentence 2[C, D]sentence 3[...]sentence n. The repetition maintains the cohesion of oral discourse. Although this sentence-linking phenomenon is extremely repetitive and stylistically unusual in well-known languages, such as English, it is used frequently and also relatively well-studied in languages of Papua New Guinea and Amazon. While this oral phenomenon also exists widely in Tibeto-Burman languages, such as Japhug rGyalrong, Puxi Qiang, and Ersu, in Yunnan and Sichuan, China, it has seldom been the subject of any substantial studies within Tibeto-Burman linguistics. Therefore, firstly, the present study generalizes the morphosyntactic and discourse characteristics of bridging repetition in Tibeto-Burman languages by analyzing the procedural descriptions and folklore narrations of 7 selected Tibeto-Burman languages. Part of the data were collected first-hand through fieldwork and the rest taken from endangered language digital archives (e.g., Pangloss and ELAR). Moreover, an investigation into Tibeto-Burman languages is likely to pinpoint the morphosyntactic characteristics that bridging repetitions correlate with, such as zero anaphora. This is a question which has not been satisfactorily solved since de Vries (2005). Finally, the PI hypothesizes that the morphosyntactic conditions must combine with a non-grammatical condition, namely the target language lacks a practical writing system, so as to function as the sufficient and necessary conditions for the occurrence of bridging repetition. Such languages have not been touched by literacy or any knowledge of writing and print, and are used only in spoken domains. A culture with such a language is called primary orality (Ong 1982). Bridging repetition is utilized in primary orality, not only as a cohesive device, but also an important cognitive device and an artful means to reduce the workload of information processing for both narrators and hearers under the changing oral context. Therefore, to test this hypothesis, bridging repetition of the Tibeto-Burman languages, as well as that in the existing literature, is further compared with at least 11 other languages (e.g., English, Beijing Mandarin, Nepali) which have well-established writing systems.