AN ALIGNMENT-BASED ACCOUNT OF AFFIXATION IN YORÙBÁ.

Most of the previous studies on affixation in Yorùbá are largely based on morphological, morpho-syntactic and semantic classifications of the affixes. So far, not much attention has been given to the morpho-prosodic well-formedness of the phenomenon, especially within the ambit of a constraint-based theoretical framework. This paper, therefore, provided a principled account of the morpho-prosodic well-formedness, with respect to structural considerations, of Yorùbá nouns that are derived by affixation. The study used Generalized Alignment (McCarthy & Prince, 1993), a model of Optimality Theory, as its analytical tool. The majority of the data were sourced from existing studies since the current work is a re-examination of affixation in Yorùbá but from a different theoretical perspective. However, the researcher also employed the services of two competent native speakers to validate some of the data, particularly the accuracy of their semantic structure. The study established that affixation in Yorùbá has a phonological goal of converting a root to a prosodic word (a disyllabic foot) especially in cases where the former is less than the latter in size with respect to syllable weight or segmental composition. More importantly, the paper claimed that Yorùbá places an affix, whether a prefix or an interfix, at the left edge of the root morpheme so as to ensure that the right edge of the root and the right edge of the prosodic word are perfectly aligned. Therefore, in consonance with previous studies, it was argued that affixation in Yorùbá is generally prefixal, and this position was entrenched by the theoretical evidence that ALIGN-RIGHT outranks ALIGN-LEFT in the morphological grammar of the language. By and large, the paper emphasized that Yorùbá is a prefixing, rather than a suffixing language simply because positional alignment or coincidence is required strictly at the right edge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]