RELATIVISATION OF NOUN PHRASE IN OBJECTIVE POSITION IN ÀNÀGÓ DIALECT OF ÒGÙN STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Ànàgó is a dialect spoken by Ànàgó Yorùbá in Yewa, Ògùn State, Nigeria, along its border with the Republic of Benin. The most popular aspect of the Ànàgó language is that of Cuba, where the Yorùbá people who were sold into slavery in the past are being transported to the Caribbean. The colonization and fall of the Old Òyó empire made the language known as Ànàgó in Cuba shrouded. A lot of work has been done on the dialect of Yorùbá, but not much has been done in this Ànàgó Yewa in Ògùn state. An attempt to fill this gap gives rise to this research work. The insertion of one sentence forms a relative construction into another sentence. Any constituents can be extracted from one position to the specifier, and the relative marker will be inserted. This work employed survey data of audio recording of oral interviews of the dialect from the speakers in the following towns and villages, like Ipókíá, Ìfòyìntèdó, Kókó, Ìdólógun, etc. The theory employed for the study is the Government and Binding theory, which is being used as one of the modules. This work analyses syntactic constructions of relativization of object nouns in the Ànàgó dialect. The noun at the object position must be extracted from its syntactic position to be placed in the landing position, which is the specifier. The extraction position will be empty, unlike when a resumptive pronoun is to replace a noun extracted from the subject position. It further explains that the objects are in two different places: the object of the verb and the object of the preposition. The object of the verb is the direct object, while the object of the preposition is the indirect object. The two objects can be shifted to the specifier and relativized. The work emphasized that the Insertion of a marker cannot take place in the syntactic position of the objects in the structure. Insertion of a marker without extraction to the specifier will make the sentence ungrammatical.