Abstract
It is an indispensable act of human beings to create novel words in their language(s). Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words and how words are formed in a language and it accounts for word formation in languages. The open class category, such as nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives, all fall under the open class category (new words can be added). All the world's languages accept the creation of new words in their lexicon. Adequate attention has not yet been paid to the interdependent relationship between Syntax and Morphology in the Yorùbá word-formation system. Therefore, this paper has made an indelible effort to exemplify the essential prerequisites of word formation in a Yorùbá language and also empirically identifies the interdependence between syntax and morphology in the holistic overview of Yorùbá word-formation system. This paper adopted primary and secondary data collection methods to source data. Some native speakers of the standard dialect (Yorùbá) were intentionally selected for structured oral interviews based on their proficiency. Data were also sourced from relevant texts, articles, journals, and so on from libraries and the internet. The Weak Lexicalist Hypothesis (WLH) is also formally employed to showcase the limitation of only morphology in Yorùbá word formation and also opines the acceptability of the morphological and syntactic levels in addressing the holistic view of Yorùbá word-formation system. Given this, various essential morphosyntactic prerequisites have been carefully selected and impeccably analyzed. Such morphosyntactic prerequisites like affixes, reduplication, nominalization through desententialization, and loan words.
Published Version
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