ABSTRACT

Abstract

Pronoun has been identified as one of the functional categories in the literature that can be understudied to trace the diachronic changes in the Language for recent past. This paper is presented to look into the detail description of pronoun in Anglo-phone Kétu residing at Ogun West Senatorial district. Data were collected from ten people, whose age ranged between 40 – 80 years. Seven were between the age range of 60 – 80 years. We decided to use data from this sub-group of people because they are more familiar with the basic form of the pronouns in the dialect. Our findings reveal that (i) pronouns in Kétu are mono-morphemic, (ii) the dialect has much more variants of pronoun occurring in different syntactic constructions than the pronouns in the Standard Yorùbá, (iii) the dialect has a complete occurrence of pronoun in all stages of person. That is, the third singular subject pronoun in the dialect is conspicuously reflected (ún or ò), (iv) the total number of pronouns in Kétu exceeds the number of pronouns in the Standard Yorùbá, (v) the dialect has six varieties of un which takes either low, mid or high tone in different syntactic positions. Based on the aforestated findings, we hereby encourage further researches into the pronouns of other Yorùbá dialects in the hope of bringing new items of information that will broaden our knowledge on the pronouns of the Standard Yorùbá.

 Keywords: Ketu Dialect, Morpho-Syntactic, Advanced Tongue Root, Mono-Morphemic, Persons.