Typology of Constituent Interrogatives in Central Yorùbá Dialects: A Minimalist Description

Abstract

This paper is an in-depth analysis of constituent interrogatives in Central Yorùbá (CY) dialects, detailing the forms and strategies employed for them with a view to examining the features that CY dialects as a group exhibit in common. Primary and secondary data were collected and subjected to syntactic analysis. This paper adopts the split CP hypothesis of Noam Chomsky’s minimalist program (MP) of generative grammar. CY dialects use question nouns (QNs), question verb (QV) and interrogative qualifiers to form their non-echoed questions. In CY dialects, the QN kà in kabi ( ka ibi ) ‘where’ does not move through the spec FocP, it is externally merged at the spec-InterP. Implying that not all QNs occupy the spec FocP in constituent interrogatives in the dialects. Focus markers ni , li and ri are also optionally dropped in the dialects.