There is a clear distinction between nominal modifiers that precede the head noun and those which follow it. Pre-nominal modifiers come in a variety of categories, including nouns, clauses, and even adjectives. These all share one important morphosyntactic characteristic: they are marked by the genitive case particle གི་ or its variants.

Semantically, pre-nominal modifiers are ordered as follows:

Possessor > Other modifiers [relative clauses] > Provenance > Type/Material

The main syntactic discrepancy for the pre-nominal modifiers is the fact that in Literary Tibetan adjectives very often occur before the noun as well as after the noun.