Prosodic marking of syntactic boundaries in Khoekhoe

Khoekhoe (ISO 639-3: naq) is an understudied low-resource Khoe-Kwadi language spoken in Namibia. Khoekhoe is an SOV language with a strict syntactic clause-medial position: the first constituent of the clause is separated from the rest of the clause by a group of auxiliaries. We investigate the locations of candidate intonation phrase boundaries in relation to syntactic boundaries, observing the phonetic-prosodic characteristics of our candidate intonation phrases in order to confirm the initial phrasing analysis and compare boundary strength associated with different syntactic boundary types. We find evidence of differential prosodic marking strategies employed in clause-final versus the clause-medial position following auxiliaries, with, for example, stronger effects of final segmental lengthening following auxiliaries compared to rather attenuated final lengthening in clause-final position.