2026 IJRSE – Volume 15 Issue 1
Available Online: 10 January 2026
Author/s:
Amusan, Kayode Victor
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA (kayode.amusan1@louisiana.edu)
Abstract:
The study investigates nominalization, and de-nominalization as processes of fusion in the Yoruba language from the theoretical viewpoint of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). It explored fused heads in the corpus dataset of the Yoruba language by primarily identifying the frequency of derived compounds in the corpus data, focusing on whether they are nominalized (as nouns) or de-nominalized into adjectives. Results show that Yoruba-affixed compounds tend to function more as nouns rather than adjectives, some words exhibit high flexibility, by allowing them to function between nominalized and de-nominalized usages depending on the context. The findings help readers understand how the morphosyntactic flexibility of derived words in Yoruba affects headless constructions. The study also affirmed that the frequent use of post-modification through PRGs in nominalized affixed compounds can be interpreted as a way to avoid ambiguity and allow for precise categorization of the head noun. The high occurrence of nominalized heads suggests a productive nominalization system in Yoruba, where the affixes (A- and O-) are used to create person-denoting nouns. It would be interesting to examine whether other Niger-Congo languages exhibit the same quality, where post-nominal modifiers and head-initial structures are common.
Keywords: nominalization, de-nominalization, headedness, fused head, headless construction
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrse.2025.25327
Cite this article:
Amusan, K. V. (2026). Nominalization, and de-nominalization in Yoruba fused-head construction. International Journal of Research Studies in Education, 15(1), 17-31. https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrse.2025.25327