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Prosodic marking of syntactic boundaries in Khoekhoe

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Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)3684-3688
Number of pages5
JournalProceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event25th Interspeech Conferece 2024 - Kos Island, Greece
Duration: 1 Sep 20245 Sep 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 International Speech Communication Association. All rights reserved.

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

  1. SDG 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy
    SDG 7 Affordable and Clean Energy
  2. SDG 9 - Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
    SDG 9 Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
  3. SDG 12 - Responsible Consumption and Production
    SDG 12 Responsible Consumption and Production

Keywords

  • Khoe-Kwadi
  • Khoekhoe
  • Khoisan
  • intonation phrase
  • prosodic boundary
  • prosody-syntax interface

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