Oladele Awobuluyi

Excised for convenience from my forthcoming Essentials of Yoruba Grammar,, Second Edition, the paper shows that cognate objects do exist in Yoruba. Claims that some relative clauses there are actual sentential nominalisation grossly overstate or misstake their case and are therefore  completely misleading. And the third-person singular subject pronoun in the language morphologically just cannot be the element ó, which is actually a tense marker in the language.

The paper shows, with four types of examples that have generally never been paid the required attention in the language, that the third-person singular subject pronoun is actually not ó, as nearly every Yoruba grammarian thinks and believes. The pronoun takes a covert form in subject position in the language, as in Yóò lọ, yóò si padà kíá. 'He/She will/would go and back in no time.'

While conversion appears to be a morphological process for many languages such as English, in Standard Yoruba it is both morphological and syntactic. That calls for redefining the process somewhat more broadly as "changing the category or function of a linguistic element virtually without changing its form." The elements that are susceptible to conversion in Yoruba are nouns and sentences, and their conversion is better accounted for syntactically rather than morphologically.