Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Institute of Asian and African Studies

In this talk I will discuss the structure of Khoekhoe dependent clauses. These are largely epitomized by the presence of clause-final enclitics. Data from a natural corpus show that the structure of Khoekhoe dependent clauses can vary in interesting ways. One the one hand, we see some dependent clauses presenting structures that closely resemble the main clause (e.g. by exhibiting a much more active clause-initial position). On the other hand, there are dependent clauses that display quite unique structures. Notwithstanding, Khoekhoe dependent clauses show particular morphosyntactic contraints that generally remain intact, for example, a lack of sentence type markers (known for main clauses). The second part of the talk will shortly look at how dependent clauses combine with the main clause, while highlighting the frequent position of various dependent clause types vis-à-vis their main clause.