NOUN PHRASE FOCUS IN ÀNÀGÓ DIALECT OF OGUN STATE

Authors

  • TITILADE MUIBAT OLAWUWO Department of African Languages and Arabic, Faculty of Arts, Emmanuel Alayande University of Education, Oyo, Nigeria.

Abstract

Ànàgó people are type of Yorùbá that can be found in Yewa (Ẹ̀gbádò) region of Ogun State. They inhabit the border line of Nigeria and Benin Republic. The dialect is not well-known like other dialects of Yorùbá like Ọ̀yọ́, Ònkò, Ìjẹ̀bú, Ẹ̀gbá, Ondó and the likes. The earlier scholars usually categorized the dialect of the area as Ẹ̀gbádò in the past, but Ẹ̀gbádò is not their dialect, hence, the focus of this paper. Three dialects that are spoken in the region are Ànàgó, Kétu and Ọ̀họ̀rí. These three dialects are spoken in Nigeria as well as in the Benin Republic i.e at the border line of the two countries, especially the Yorùbá towns in Benin Republic, which happens to be part of old Ọ̀yọ́ Empire and near the former name of Benin Republic which is ‘Dahomey’. This paper focuses on the Ànàgó of Nigeria which can be found in Yewa North Local Government Area of Ògùn State. It explores the syntax of the language to work on, which is the focus construction of the dialect. This work is on how the noun phrase were focused irrespective of where they are. The theory adopted in the work is the X-bar theory of the Government and Binding propounded by Chomsky. The theory is being adopted and used because it involves extraction of constituents and landing it somewhere. It also involves deletion and addition of constituents in a sentence. The findings revealed that all the Noun phrases could be focused, it can be the one at the subject position or object position, but adding that any noun to be focused must be extracted from their syntactic position and being shifted to the specifier, which attracts the addition of a marker immediately after landing the noun at the specifier. The marker ‘li’ is being used as a driver in Ànàgó dialect which is regarded as the focus marker.

Keywords:

Ànàgó, Yorùbá, Focus Constructions, Dialects

Published

30-04-2024

How to Cite

TITILADE MUIBAT OLAWUWO. (2024). NOUN PHRASE FOCUS IN ÀNÀGÓ DIALECT OF OGUN STATE. International Journal of Humanities, Literature and Art Research, 4(6). Retrieved from https://mediterraneanpublications.com/mejhlar/article/view/398