Prosodic Reduplication in Yorùbá

Yoruba is considered by Haspelmath & Sims (2010) to be an analytic language with very little affixation. However, they seem to ignore the widespread use of reduplication found in the language. The phenomenon of reduplication has been examined in Yorùbá as productive process of word formation (Pulleyblank 2009). In this view, this paper examines the prosodic template in Yorùbá focusing specifically on Yorùbá adverbial reduplicated forms and other forms. Previous studies on prosodic analysis of reduplication in Yoruba have focused on agentive forms, any-forms, distributive and gerundive forms (Orie & Pulleyblank 2002, Pulleyblank 2009). However, no previous studies focused on the adverbial where I have observed some reduplicative patterns. In this paper, data on adverbials are examined and compared with other reduplicative Taiwo O. Ehineni Department of Linguistics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 Email: [email protected] Received 3 August, 2017; Revised 24 August, 2017; Accepted 5 September, 2017 Copyright © 2017 Language Research Institute, Sejong University Journal of Universal Language is an Open Access Journal. All articles are distributed online under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 40 Prosodic Reduplication in Yorùbá forms. The discussion, which is framed within the optimalitytheoretic framework, reveals that the base is required to be bimoraic (foot or syllable) for reduplication to take place since monomoraic forms do not reduplicate. I argue that while the basic constraint hierarchy for Yoruba prosodic reduplication can be presented as IDENT BR, RED = STEM, NO HIATUS >> MAX-IO, other constraints ranking (as discussed in the paper) may be triggered by other processes occurring within the reduplication.