ABSTRACT

Abstract

Many morphologists have delved into provision of morphological explanations that account for decomposition of words with the intention of bringing out the morphological contents of each morphological complex word. However, findings have shown that a lot of explanations are undetailed and incomprehensive to provide lucid explanations of the basic decomposition of the base morpheme. This paper tries to propose a theoretical basis through which a lot of information could be accessed and be employed to proffer solution to the seemingly unexplainable facts in morphological decomposition. Although, the testing template for this theory – Descriptive and Derivative Hypothesis (DDH), in this paper, is Yoruba language, we hope that further implementation of the theory in other languages of the world would prove the workability and authenticity of the theory to solve some seemingly intractable morphological problems in the world languages. We observe that a lot of morphological errors is prevailing in derivative modeling of lexical morphological theories in the literature. This theory, if fully expanded, will re-direct the research focus of the researchers to the descriptive aspect of morphological findings in the literature.