FOCUS CONSTRUCTIONS IN Ọ̀HỌ̀RÍ YORÙBÁ

Abstract

Focus construction is a universal syntactic phenomenon that is used to indicate prominence in natural language through the use of a syntactic or prosodic device. The construction has been widely examined in various Yorùbá dialects, pinpointing the morpheme that expresses the phenomenon and how the construction is projected in each dialect. However, Ọ̀họ̀rí as a dialect of Yorùbá (Oyelaran 1976; Adeniyi, 2000) has not benefited from research work on focus constructions. Therefore, this paper attempts to investigate focus constructions in Ọ̀họ̀rí Yorùbá. The data used in this study were elicited from six adult native speakers of Ọ̀họ̀rí in Kétu, Ègùwá, and Asá, located in the Yewa North Local Government Area of Ogun State, Nigeria, via structured interviews using a digital recording device. The study employed the minimalist program of Chomsky (1995, 1998, and 2002) and the alternative semantics of Rooth (1992, 1999, 2005, and 2015) in its analyses. The article discusses focusable constituents in the dialect and claims that focusing is ex-situ in Ọ̀họ̀rí. The paper proposes two structural configurations for focus projections in the dialect. The study thereafter argues for in-situ focus constructions as the answer to in-situ content questions in Yorùbá. The article conclusively discusses the semantic roles and interpretations of focus constructions in Ọ̀họ̀rí Yorùbá.