Antisymmetry and Declaratives in Khoekhoe

This paper describes the word order of Khoekhoe, a central Khoisan language, assuming the Antisymmetry theory of Kayne (1994). A declarative sentence in Khoekhoe has comparatively free word order patterns. However, it becomes more restrictive when a DP is focused. With Kayne’s assumption and the morphology of functional category in Khoekhoe, focused and non-focused word order patterns naturally follow. Khoekhoe shows the validity of the Antisymmetry theory applied to SOV languages like Japanese, because, in Khoekhoe, an operator-like element like focus has a fix word order, namely the Spec of some functional category, which means that the case marker does not contribute to licensing of arguments at all.