Project

A Morphosyntatic Account of Five Yoruba Dialects: Oyo, Ikale, Moba, Igbomina, and Owe

Program

African Humanities Program Postdoctoral Fellowships

Department

Linguistics, African & Asian Studies

Abstract

This study focuses on the phonological work of Adetugbo (1967) and Akingube (1978), the morphological work of Fresco (1970), and Ajiboye's (2004) work on the distribution of the focus marker "ni" in relative clauses and WH-constructions in the Moba dialect, among others. The goal is to find out if an older stage in the morphosyntactic development of Yoruba corresponding to clear evidence of phonological archaism in the eastern area can be identified. It relies on the analysis of traditional texts to determine the full paradigms of tense, agreement, and other closed-class items such as complementizers and copulas.