ANOTHER THOUGHT ON níláti
ANOTHER THOUGHT ON níláti
Credit: Prof L. O. Adewole
Yoruba for academic purpose
In this note[1],
we contend that neither the Yorùbá orthography nor the grammar of
English can serve as a useful guide when it comes to deciding the
syntactic category and function of ní láti.
Dans dete note, nous soutenons le fait que in l’orthographe Yoruba ni la
grammaire de l’anglais n’est d’aucune utilité en ce que concerne
l’identification de la catégorie grammaticale ou des fonctins de ní
láti.
According to Perlmutter (1974: 83), ‘argumentation is not the only thing
that should be taught in early syntax courses … the student also needs
to learn how to see generalizations in data’. In agreement with this
view, I suggest in Adewole (1990) that ní
‘has/have’ in the following sentences should be regarded as the same
lexical item and that any different readings should be ascribed to the
different lexical contexts the item finds itself in.
1a. ó ní ìwé
he has book
‘He has a book’.
1b. ó ní ọ̀bẹ
he has knife
‘He has a knife’
2a. ó ní ìfẹ́ sí i
he has love to him
‘He loves him’.
2b. ó ní owó
he has money
‘He is rich’
3a. ó ní ní àtilọ
he has in act-of-go
‘He has to go’.
Yoruba orthography: ó níláti lọ
3b. ó ní ní àtiṣe é
he has in act-of-do-it
‘He has to do it’
Yorùbá orthography: ´ó ní láti ṣe é’
I do not base my claim here on the Yorùbá orthography because, although
great progress has been made on the language’s orthography, we are still
very far from having an acceptable one. Neither do I base it on the
English glosses because I believe that idiomatic English usage cannot
serve as a useful guide when it comes to deciding what the function of a
word is in a Yorùbá sentence. This view of mine has been challenged in
the preceding article and I shall try and answer some of the points made[2].
The reason the writer is more concerned with the so-called ‘foreign usage’ of níláti is because, according to him, níláti is a loan-translation (or calque) and as a loan-translation, níláti ‘may not respect the morphological or syntactic structure of its host language’. I do not subscribe to this claim that níláti is a calque. A calque, according to Crystal 91985: 40), is a
term used in COMPARATIVE and HISTORICAL linguistics to refer to a type
of BORROWING, where the morphemic constituents of the borrowed WORD or
PHRASE are translated ITEM by item into equivalent MORPHEMES in the new
language. (emphasis his).
An example given for such ‘loan-translations’ in English is power politics from German macht politik. In Yorùbá, we can also have ọ̀nà olópòó méjì ‘dual carriageway’. Níláti cannot be equated with any of these. Níláti is made up of ní ‘has/have’, ní ‘in’ and àti ‘derivational morpheme’. If the three morphemes are now translated to ‘have/has to’ in English, then we cannot regard níláti as a calque; if have/has is loan-translated into Yorùbá as ní, I do not see how to could be translated into Yorùbá as láti[3].
What surprises me here is that despite the fact that the author would want us to write ní ìgbà tí as nígbàtí,
he still recognizes the structure of the item as (in-time-COMP) ‘at the
time’ before translating the item into idiomatic English as when/while. My contention is not whether níláti should or should not be translated into idiomatic English as have/has to but that the individual morphemes that make up the word should be recognized.
One of the items used by the author to support his claim that níláti should be regarded as a lexical item is tàbí ‘or’. According to the author, nobody has ever queried the morphology of tàbí ‘or’. The same cannot be said of níláti as I stated in my 1990 article.
The author also wonders (p.6 of MS) how láti-VP would be classified if ní is separated from ní láti-VP and also what will be its syntactic relation to the sentence be? The answer is that láti-VP
will be a PP and the item will be performing the normal functions
performed by PP’s in sentences (see Yusuf 1985, 1987 and 1988 for
details).
The writer then (p. 11 of MS) equates níláti with dandan as in
6a. ó níláti dára
3sg-must-good
‘It must be good’.
6b. Dandan ni kó dára
Compulsory-POC-COMP-3sg good
‘Obligatorily it will be good’
The question that could be raised here is whether we can say that because we can use both níláti and dandan as above, they belong to the same category, that is, if we classify níláti as a modal, can we also classify dandan ‘compulsory’ as a modal? I know the writer would not do this. He would classify dandan ‘compulsory’ either as a noun or as an adverb. In the same manner, we are saying that even if both níláti and gbọ́dọ̀
share part of their meanings, it does not follow that we should
classify both of them as modal verbs and even if we do that, we shall
still need to account for each of the components of níláti which can occur independently. Lyons’ (1981: 111-112) view is akin to ours when he states that:
Though there is an intrinsic connection between the meaning of forms and
their distribution, it is their distribution alone that is of direct
concern to the grammarian. Anyone who wishes to understand modern
grammatical theory, in its most distinctive and most interesting
developments, must be able to think of the distribution of forms
independently of their meaning.
Note that although the following Yorùbá words are glossed as single items in English, this does not make them indivisible uints.
7. Yorùbá English
gbé wá ‘bring’
lọ gbé wá ‘fetch’
rẹ́ jẹ ‘cheat’
rí gbà ‘receive’
These few examples clearly show that English glosses should not be used to analyse Yorùbá words.
From the above comments, it will be seen that I stand by the analysis I proposed in my 1990 article.
References
Abraham, R.C. 1958. Dicitionary of Modern Yorùbá. London: Oxford University Press.
Adewole, Fẹ́mi. (1990) Gbọ́dọ̀ ‘must’ analysis of a Yorùbá modal verb. Journal of West African Languages XX. 73-82.
Awobulutyi, Ọládélé. 1967). Studies in the syntax of the standard Yorùbá verb. Ph.D dissertation, Columbia University.
Awoyale, ‘Yiwọla 1963. On the development of the verb infinitive phrase in Yorùbá. Studies in Afrian Linguistics 14:1: 71-102.
Crystal, David. 1985. A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Ekundayo, S.A. (1977. Lexical nominalizability restrictions in Yoruba. Studies in African Linguistics, Supplement7: 43-51.
Lyons, John 1981. Language and ligunistics: an introduction. Cambridge: University Press.
Perimutter, M.David 1974. On teaching syntactic argumentation.
Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics, ed. By
F.P. Dinneen. Pp. 83-91.
Yusufu, Ore. 1985. A functional explanation for the Ni-NP construction
in Yoruba. Studies in African Linguistics, Supplement 9: 329-334.
______ 1987. Verb phrase serialization in Yoruba in discourse perspective. Ph.D dissertation, University of California.
______ 1988. Participant coding in Yoruba: the syntactic function of Ni.
Unpublished paper, Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages,
University of Ilorin, Nigeria.
[1] This paper was earlier published as Adewọle, L.O. (1991), ‘Another Thought on Níláti’, Journal of West African Languages (Texas, USA): 1-3.
[2] I am grateful to the editor for making the pre-published version of the article available to me for discussion
Comments
Post a Comment