Headhood in Yorùbá nominal compounds

Abstract

The lexical status of a class of composite words known as the nominal compounds in Yorùbá, is the focus of this article. The different semantic relations associated with the constituents of Yorùbá compounds as well as their varying deep structures reveal that in locating nominal compound heads, efforts should be made to describe the percolation effects on the concatenated forms. The notion of x-bar syntax of Williams (1981a & 1981b), among others, was supported by semantic relatedness of forms in compounds for the analysis. This work essentially points to the fact that Yorùbá compounds cannot be said to exhibit a similar realization of headedness in their different tokens. Thus, Williams’ (1981b:252) Right Hand Head Rule (RHHR) is found to not be a universal phenomenon. Condition is plausible anywhere in Yorùbá because Yorùbá is among those exceptional languages whose morphological heads are on the left hand for those that are headed, just as they are in the syntax of the language. We still find that some are double headed, while some are headless. As Yorùbá nominal compounds cannot be said to exhibit uniformity in their headedness, they cannot be explained using a monolithic approach of either syntax or morphology. The phenomenon of word headedness in the language can best be explained along the interface axis of morpho-syntax and semantics.

S.Afr.J.Afr.Lang.,2007, 2