A Description of Syntactic Transformations in Yàgbà

Abstract

This paper examines the syntactic transformations of Yàgbà, a north-eastern Yoruba dialect spoken in Kogi State, Nigeria, with the aim of uncovering how derivational processes sustain grammatical relations and contribute to discourse organisation. Drawing on a corpus of naturally occurring speech, complemented by targeted elicitation, the analysis identifies five transformation types—verb movement, pronominalisation, WH-fronting, topicalization, and clefting—as central to the dialect’s grammar. Three significant insights emerge from the findings. First, Yàgbà consistently employs verb movement in object-demoting constructions, especially within focus structures where the particle rí/rín marks discourse prominence. Second, left-dislocation in Yàgbà strongly requires resumptive pronouns, in contrast to Standard Yoruba where optionality is more common. Third, WH-fronting in Yàgbà often co-occurs with resumptives, underscoring a discourse-sensitive strategy not uniformly observed across Yoruboid varieties. These findings demonstrate that Yàgbà structures foreground a delicate interplay between syntax and discourse, while simultaneously highlighting typological micro-variation within the Yoruba continuum. Beyond its descriptive value, this work adds to the comparative study of Niger-Congo languages, providing evidence for how transformation processes adapt to local discourse ecologies. Ultimately, the paper contributes both to the documentation of an under-described dialect and to theoretical debates within transformational grammar, information structure, and cross-dialectal typology.