FORMS AND FEATURES OF PERSONAL PRONOUNS IN THE ÌLÀJẸ DIALECT OF YORÙBÁ

Abstract

Personal pronouns specify grammatical features of the persons involved in discourse. Previous studies in Ìlàjẹ, a southeastern Yorùbá dialect, have identified these features as basically morphosyntactic in nature despite their various morphophonemic realisations in syntax. However, the geometry of the morphophonemic features as represented in the native speakers' intuition has not been formalised. This study was, therefore, designed to examine Ìlàjẹ personal pronouns, with a view to describing their forms, features and syntactic distributions encoded in the lexicon to provide a feature-based generative analysis. Heidi Harley's Feature Geometry and John McCarthy's Nonconcatenative Approach complemented with Phase Theory of Noam Chomsky's Minimalist Program were adopted as framework. The ethnographic design was used. Five communities (Ìgbọ́kọ̀dá, Ugbò, Ayétòrò, Ùlóghó and Ìkórígho-Ètìkàn) were purposively selected to represent different geographical locations spanning the entire Ìlàjẹ Local Government Area of Ondo State. Guided by Ibadan Syntactic Paradigm, key informant interviews were conducted with 10 native speakers between 37 and 97 years, two each from the communities. Interviews were complemented with audio recordings of Ìlàjẹ folksongs. Data were subjected to syntactic interlinear glossing and nonlinear morphological analyses. Fifty-one personal pronoun forms were identified in Ìlàjẹ: 31 dependent and 20 independent. The dependent pronouns have the following forms: six affirmative and six negative subjects, six high-toned and six mid-toned objects, six possessives, a resumptive and a logophor. The independent pronouns have these forms: six affirmative and six negative subjects, six objects and a resumptive. In each pronoun, four major features were identified which were further specified into eight distinctive sub-features with each having a binary + (positive) or – (negative) value as follows: person [+/-participant, +/-speaker], number [+/-count, +/-singular], case [+/-nominative, +/-accusative] and saliency [+/-definiteness, +/-logophoric]. The first, second and third person pronouns bear [+participant, +speaker], [+participant, -speaker] and [-participant, -speaker] features respectively, while singular and plural pronouns bear [+count, +singular] and [+count, -singular]. The nominative, accusative and possessive pronouns are characterised with [+nominative, -accusative], [-nominative, +accusative] and [-nominative, -accusative], respectively. Discourse-sensitive emphasis of definiteness and logophoricity in the pronoun were specified as follows: [+definiteness, +logophoric] for the logophoric pronoun, òghun; as [+definiteness, -logophoric] for nonlogophoric independent pronouns (èmi 'I', ùwọ 'you'); and as [-definiteness, -logophoric] for the dependent pronouns (mo 'I', wo 'you'). The third person singular resumptives, rẹ̀ and òghun are specified as [-definiteness] and [+definiteness] respectively since these resumptives agree with any antecedent regardless of its number or person features. Ìlàjẹ exhibits two syntactic distributions of the pronouns. One, independent pronouns are restricted to the Determiner Phrase (DP) and the Complementizer Phrase (CP) domains. Two, the dependent pronouns occur within the light verb phrase (vP) domain. Personal pronouns in Ìlàjẹ have three spell-out phases: the DP phase (for vP-internal independent pronouns); the vP phase (for all dependent pronouns); and the CP phase (for the independent pronouns moved beyond the Tense Phrase). Ìlàjẹ dependent and independent personal pronouns are more appropriately analysed using detailed specifications of their features. These features determine the syntactic distribution of each form of the pronoun.