Headhood in Yorùbá nominal compounds

Abstract

The lexical status of a class of composite words known as the nominal compounds in Yorùbá, is the focus of this article. The different semantic relations associated with the constituents of Yorùbá compounds as well as their varying deep structures reveal that in locating nominal compound heads, efforts should be made to describe the percolation effects on the concatenated forms. The notion of x-bar syntax of Williams (1981a & 1981b), among others, was supported by semantic relatedness of forms in compounds for the analysis.