Dahl and the Yorùbá Perfective: A Note

 

Dahl and the Yorùbá Perfective: A Note

Credit: Prof L. O. Adewole

Yoruba for academic purpose

In Adewọle (1986)[1], we argue for the recognition of the much discussed Yorùbá High Tone Syllable (HTS henceforth), as in (1), as the perfective marker in the language.

(1) (a)  Àwọn túlẹ̀ ẹ́ gba ìsinmi

They student HTS get leave

‘The students are on holiday’

(b) Òjò ó rọ̀

Rain HTS fall

‘It rained’

In this paper, one of the points used to justify our arguments is the boundedness notion of perfectivity suggested by Dahl (1984). We later note that in Dahl (1985), Yorùbá is one of the languages used to exemplify the cross-linguistic classification of the Tense and Aspect Systems (TAS henceforth). One of the ‘incidence categories’ identified in the classification is the Perfective Aspect. With this category included in the said cross-linguistic classification, one would expect that Yorùbá would be one of the languages in which this category is realized. But, surprisingly enough, no mention of the category is made in the TAS characterization presented for the language. At this juncture, the question one would ask is the reason why Dahl does not postulate a perfective category for the language. In this paper, we are suggesting some of the possible reasons why Dahl fails to recognize the need for a perfective category in the language.

We start by pointing to the difference between the language in which the data are given and the language into which they are to be translated. The difference in the two languages could produce some errors which may not necessarily be the fault of the informants. For example, Yorùbá does not mark tense and gender. Thus, a sentence such as Ó jẹun may variously mean ‘He eats or he ate’, ‘It eats or it ate’, ‘She eats or she ate’. If, instead of using pronouns or proper names in the subject position, we use bare nominals then the translation problems become compounded. Hence, Ọkùnrin ín lè ṣiṣẹ́ ju obìnrin lọ may, in varying contexts, be read as ‘All men can work more than all women’, ‘Some men can work more than some women’, ‘The generic kind of man can work more than the generic kind of woman’. Dahl (1985:49) notes these types of translational problems too when he states that:

Even a competent informant may of course fail to translate a sentence in the desired way … in general, it may be suspected that translations are often rather unrepresentative of the  translator’s normal language … The general impression … was that the method of letting speakers translate foreign languages into their own was the least reliable of the methods tested.

Dahl even goes a step further in making a representative translation of the informants’ normal language difficult by instructing the informants that a translation of the English sentences which is ‘systematically considerably more complex than the others’ (Dahl 1985: 49) should be omitted. With this instruction, it seems that the Yorùbá informants steer clear of translations that may require a lot of justifications. While translating, they might inadvertently have introduced concepts which are foreign to the language.

Asante (1985: 249-250) notes this type of error and warns that in translating the Eboics (which has a great deal in common with Yorùbá) sentence ‘I done ate’ into English, ‘something is lost in the translation’. The translation given for the sentence is ‘I have eaten’ ‘which does carry the information about completed action, but also carries information about the relationship of the action in time’ whereas the original sentence merely means ‘I complete the action of eating’. In this sentence, the ‘preverbal done specifies nothing in reference to time’. He then concludes that:

As can be seen, while the Standard English speaker must inflect all verbs for tense, the Eboics speaker does not feel the need to be redundant in expressing the manner or aspect of the action.

Rowlands (1964: 1) also notes that an informant may fail to give the desired information if not adequately instructed by a researcher. According to him:

When a Lagos’ informant was recently asked by me to give an informal account (to be recorded on tape) of Yorùbá naming ceremonies, he began to speak in a rather formal way, using the ‘yio’ future particle which is characteristic of many ‘Oyo’ areas. After being stopped and told that what was wanted was an informal talk in the sort of language that would be used in talking to his friends or to his wife he made no further use of the particle ‘yio’ but used instead the particle ‘a’. The latter particle is much more widely used in speech than its limited occurrence in written Yoruba would suggest, because written Yoruba is still heavily influenced by the language of the Bible translation, which favours the use of ‘yio’.

We suspect that the Yoruba informants are affected by the type of problems noted by Asante and Rowlands.

Second, the major concern of Dahl is to identify and compare the uses of overtly signaled morphological, periphrastic and derivational realizations of the grammatical categories (he calls these ‘incidence categories’) across languages in terms of a universal framework. When analyzing Yorùbá, Dahl fails to identify any periphrastic expression which is identical to our own HTS in his data. The reason for this is not difficult to discern. Because of its characteristics, the HTS is, to borrow Welmers’ (1964:1) words, best described as one of those ‘residue of verbal (items) which do not fit the predominant patterns’. With this description, the non-inclusion of the HTS in the questionnaires received from the informants becomes less surprising. Our guess is that the informants are unaware of the importance of the HTS.

Ọ̀kẹ́ (1969), in his analysis of the Yorùbá verbs, objects to the use of texts in his analysis because he believes that most junctural syllables of the language are not often represented in writing. The approved Modern Orthography for the language does not help here because it states specifically that ‘Vowel lengthening between words should not be indicated’ (Bamgboṣe 1976: 8). This is arbitrary, as the same Orthography allows for the indication of both the third person singular pronominal object and the so-called verbal particle as exemplified in (2) (a) and (b) respectively.

(2) (a)  Mo rí i

I see it

‘I saw it’

Ó ṣòroó ṣe

(b) (i)  It hard PRT do

‘It is a difficult task’

(ii)  Kì í wá

NEG PRT come

‘He is not always present’

The call for non-indication of lengthened vowel made above goes a long way in limiting the use of lengthened syllables, not only for the HTS and the perfective marker to research works, also for the junctural syllables that mark the infinitive and associative. The fact that Dahl’s informants’ translation are not fleshed out in any detail, especially for the HTS as one would have done in a research work, could serve as another reason why Dahl does not recognize the item and its function.

Another point to be considered here is that Dahl, who is not a native speaker of the language, is unable to lay his hand on any recorded text that could be used to cross-check the data submitted to him. In addition, we suspect that one of the informants on Yorùbá is not a native speaker of the language and that few works on the language are available to the author himself. The only work cited which has any relevance to Yorùbá is Welmers (1973). In this work, Welmers (1973: 383) accepts the previous analysis of Rowlands (1954) in which the arguments for the HTS as a third person singular pronominal subject were presented. If Dahl recognizes the HTS, it seems as if its analysis as presented by Welmers is acceptable to him; hence, he fails to recognize the item as an exponent of an incidence category. Rowlands’ approach to the description of the function of the HTS has since been refuted by Awobuluyi (1975).

In addition to these points, almost all the examples used by Dahl have pronominal subjects. As the HTS is morphologically constrained in this environment, it seems impossible for him, at least from the limited data available, to realise what is happening. Note the following examples:

(3) (a)  Mo gba ìsinmi

I get leave

‘I am on holiday’

(b) Ó rọ̀

It rain

‘It rained’

In (3) (a) and (b), the HTS which occurs in the environments of the nominal subjects in (1) (a) an (b) is now absent. The reason for its absence is that the morphosyntactic features that realize the perfective have no exponent in the environment of the pronomonal subjects (See Zwicky (1985) and Adewọle (1986)).

It is clear to us that the Modern Yorùbá Orthography has had a far reaching effect on the data submitted to Dahl by his informants. As it may also have the same effect on future analyses of the language, we suggest that changes be introduced into the Orthography, especially as regards the lengthened vowels. We suggest that the HTS and junctural syllables that mark the associative and the infinitive should be indicated, as shown in (4) (a), (b) and (c) respectively, whenever they perform some functions in sentences and the environment allows for their indication.

(4) (a)  Òjò ó rọ̀

Rain HTS fall

‘It rained’

(b) Ilé e Délé

House Ass Dele

‘Dele’s house’

(c) Ó fẹ́ ẹ́ lọ

He want INF go

‘He wants to go’

What is more, the HTS can easily be introduced into the Orthography with no discrepancies. For, the same Orthography, as mentioned earlier, specifies the indication of the lengthened vowels that realize the third person singular pronominal object and the so-called verbal particle. We strongly suggest that the principles that apply to these two should be extended to all junstural syllables.

References

Adewọle, L. O. (1986), ‘The Yorùbá High Tone Syllable Revisited’, Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh Work in Progress 19: 81-94.

Adewọle, L.O. (forthcoming), ‘Yóò: The So-called Future Particle in Yorùbá’, University of East Anglia Papers in Linguistics.

Asante, Molefi Kate (1985) ‘The African Essence in Afro-American Languages’, in African Culture, the Rhythms of Unity: Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies 81, edited by Molefi Kate Asante and Kariamu Welsh Asante, pp. 233-252. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Awobuluyi, O. (1975), ‘On “the Subject Concord Prefix” in Yoruba’, Studies in African Linguistics 6, 3: 215-238.

Bamgboṣe, Ayo (1976), ‘Yorùbá Orthography Notes’, Nigerian Language Teacher 2, 1: 7-9.

Dahl, Osten (1984), ‘Perfectivity in Slavonic and Other Languages’, in Aspect Bound: A Voyage into the Realm of Germanic, Slavonic and Fino-Ugrian Aspectology’, edited by de Casper Groot and Hannu Tommola, pp. 3-22. Dordrecht: Foris Publication.

Dahl, Osten (1985), Tense and Aspect Systems. New York: Basil Blackwell.

Ọ̀kẹ́, D.O. (1969), ‘Grammatical Study of Yorùbá Verbs.’, PhD Dissertation, University of York.

Rowlands, E. C. (1954), ‘Types of Word Junctions in Yorùbá’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 16, 11: 376-388.

Rowlands, E.C. (1964), ‘Some Morphological Problems in Yorùbá’, Paper Presented at the 4^th West African Languages Congress, Ibadan, 16-21, March, 1964.

Welmers, W.E. (1964), ‘Statives in Some West African Languages’, Paper Presented at the 4^th West African Languages Congress, Ibadan, 16-21, March, 1964.

Welmers, W.E. (1973), African Language Structures. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Zwicky, A.M. (1985), ‘Rules of Allomorphy and Phonology-Syntax Interaction’, Journal of Linguistics 21: 431-436.

 

 

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[1] ‘Dahl and the Yorùbá Perfective: A Note’ was published as L.O. Adewole (1987), ‘Dahl (1985) and  the Yorùbá Perfective: A Note’, Belfast Working Papers in Language and Linguistics (University of Ulster) 9: 1-9.