Negation within the scope of focus activation in Yorùbá Language

Abstract

Focus construction is a syntactic process where sentence constituents are given prominence by fronting and marked with a marker. Within the domain of the specifier of Focus Phrase (FocP) in the Yoruba language, the focused constituent moves to the specifier (spec) of FocP and is demarcated from the rest of the clause for attentional state and word order requirements. The focused constituent can be negated by kọ́ in negative focus construction. The hierarchical interaction of kọ́ and focused constituent has not received adequate attention from scholars working on Yoruba focus domains. Thus, this paper adopts Rizzi’s Cartographic Analysis to resolve the interpretation and hierarchical anomaly found in existing literature. The research is qualitative, and primary data were collected from five purposively selected competent native speakers of Yoruba while secondary data consisted of strings of sentence constructions collected from the markets and extant works. The paper discovered that the scope of negation determines the structural architecture of spec-FocP; topicalized and interrogated items cannot be negated, hence both the spec-InterP and spec-TopP are opaque to the so-called constituent negation scope kọ́, and that the complement domain of Neg⁰ houses an XP (DP, CP, PP, or TP) before being moved for the purpose spec-head valuation. The negator seems to induce a hierarchical order of dominance in interpretation. Hence, scholars depict the negator wrongly in the domain thereby providing wrong interpretation and wrong structural representation of the domain. The implication of this finding shows that there are still more works on the grammar of the Yoruba language.