Institute of African and Diaspora Studies

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Browsing Institute of African and Diaspora Studies by Author "Eleshin, A."

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    Open Access
    High-Toned Vowel Prefix in Yorùbá
    (Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos, 2020) Eleshin, A.
    In the traditional analysis of Standard Yorùbá prefixes, high-toned vowels and the vowel u are not eligible to be used as prefixes. There have been various explanations to these phenomenon, especially phonological analysis that justifies the exclusion of these two segments from the list of possible prefixes in the language. In their recent works on Yorùbá prefixes, Awobuluyi (2008) and Ilori (2010) claim that consonants in Yorùbá can be used as prefixes to derive gerunds. This paper argues against these two claims and submit that there actually exists a high-toned vowel prefix, í-,in Yorùbá, and that the nouns it derives are gerunds. It employs the theoretical models of Fixed Segmentism (Alderete, Beckman, Benua, Gnanadesikan, McCarthy, Urbanczyk,1999; Keane, 2006) and Augmentative Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1994; Davis & Tsujimura, 2014)to justify the claim that high-toned vowel prefix í-is a fixed segment with a gerundive feature in the language. However, due to some language internal constraint which does not allow for high-toned vowels to begin v-initial lexical items, such derivations are blocked. The need for augmentation of the ill-formed derivation by copying the initial consonant of the root which is then subsequently moved to the initial position of the derived word, therefore, arises to repair the seeming ill-formedness in the derivation.
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    Open Access
    Machine Translation and Yorùbá: Matters Arising
    (University of Lagos Press and Bookshop Limited, 2020) Eleshin, A.
    The art of translation as an academic discipline was developed over a couple of centuries ago. The relationship between two or more societies and cultures has necessitated the essence of translation. In the mid-twentieth century,machine translation, which is a section of computer-aided translation,was introduced as a form of artificial intelligence in translation studies for the alignment of the source text and target text pairs (Munday,2001).In order to ease the means and methods of translation in the global world and to meet up with the requirement of artificial intelligence, the use of machine translation was validated.This study analyses the form and methods of machine translation with Yorùbá as either the source text or the target text.It has been realized that various inadequacies and inconsistencies exist in the process of translating text to/from Yorùbá.In this study, I have identified three major factors responsible for the inadequacies,namely: (1) linguistic/sociolinguistic; (2)stylistic;and (3) sociocultural. The communicative competence model of language analysis is employed to see if the linguistic approach is capable of proffering solutions to the problems identified above. It is believed that this approach will help validate the process of translating the Yorùbá language appropriately in an automated circumstance.
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    Open Access
    Typology of Headedness in Yorùbá Nominal Derivations
    (Language Research Institute, Sejong University, 2021-03) Eleshin, A.
    This study examines headedness in different nominalisation processes in Yorùbá. This research aims to investigate possible unification of head analysis in Yorùbá nominalisation. Three major word formation strategies exist in Yorùbá, namely, affixation, reduplication and nounnoun compounding (N-N compounding henceforth). The morphosyntactic relationship among these three, in respect to a unifying analytical goal, has not been fairly considered. Operation merge, with other principles of the Minimalist Programme, is selected to validate my claim about the unified analysis of headedness in Yorùbá. This paper employs the qualitative method of data collection. Data were sourced from both primary and secondary means. I claim that there exists a parallel morphosyntactic structure for the three nominalisation processes in Yorùbá. I establish that the three nominalisation structures have the same syntactic representation as far as their headedness and their internal syntax is concerned. Findings in this study show that, firstly, prefixes, reduplicant and the first noun in an N-N compounding are the head. Secondly, they all occupy the same parallel positions in their varying structures.