Word Order Variation in Khoekhoe
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper examines word order variation in Khoekhoe (short for Khoekhoegowab, also known as Nama/Damara), a Central Khoisan language spoken in Namibia and South Africa. Khoekhoe has been claimed repeatedly to have a clause-second position (Washburn 2001, den Besten 2002, Brugman 2009) and to have topological fields similar to German (Witzlack-Makarevich 2006). However, previous generative analyses in GB/Minimalism (Washburn 2001, Den Besten 2002, Huybregts ms.) are based on descriptive grammars and make empirical assumptions that turn out to be problematic in the light of corpus data and elicited data. Based on new data, we show that the phenomenon can be analyzed by allowing the Khoekhoe VP to be discontinuous, with monomoraic words intervening, while multimoraic words and phrases are subject to strict head-final ordering. The analysis is similar to the cross-linguistic account of V2 proposed by Wetta (2011), confirming the applicability of the general approach to languages with positionally stipulated word order.
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