You have no items in your shopping cart.
SUMMARY
After much examination into the pluralization strategies in Yoruba, the various strategies employed in the formation of the languages plurals and how they function are described. The formation of the plurals of nouns and pronouns were examined and analyzed and this analysis and description revealed the nature of Yoruba as an isolating language. The study examined all the processes employed by Yoruba in the formation of its nouns and pronouns plural forms.
These strategies or processes are syntactic rather than morphologic in that they employ plural words other than plural markers. The plural words employed in Yoruba can be likened to independent plural words since they are free morphemes. The forms of singular words remain unchanged when they change grammatical positions of being singular to plural. Plurals in Yoruba are marked with morphemes or words not solely dedicated to plural markings. In Yoruba, obligatory plural marking and obligatory agreement is absent unlike English where this is present as in ‘two books’, ‘plenty girls’ etc.
The syntactic/analytic nature of the pluralization in Yoruba show that the language is syntactic / analytic and according to the typology done by August Schleicher, a syntactic/analytic language is an isolating language. An isolating language is an analytic language that is extreme in its nature that words are made up of single morphemes, tense and agreement, affixes are not morphologically marked on verbs and nouns and they have one meaning to each word. It can then be concluded that pluralization in Yoruba employs more than one strategy and the process is syntactic in nature just as the language is.
