An Analysis of Metaphorical Extensions in Yoruba Agricultural Vocabulary: Evidence of Lexical Creativity

Agricultural vocabulary in any language represents a fundamental conceptual layer through which speakers understand and categorise human experience, making its metaphorical extensions into other semantic domains a particularly revealing index of lexical creativity. This study analyses metaphorical extensions in Yoruba agricultural vocabulary, examining how farming, soil, and harvest concepts are extended to construct meaning in domains including social relationships, moral discourse, political commentary, and religious expression. Data were collected through a combination of corpus analysis drawing on a 50,000-word spoken Yoruba corpus and elicitation interviews with 40 native speakers, including both rural agricultural communities in Oyo State and urban communities in Lagos. The study applies conceptual metaphor theory and cognitive semantics, drawing on Lakoff and Johnson's framework alongside Yoruba ethnobotanical and cultural knowledge resources. Existing cognitive semantic research on Yoruba has focused on spatial and temporal metaphors, with agricultural vocabulary as a source domain for metaphorical extension being significantly underexplored. This study fills that cognitive linguistic gap. The research maps the primary conceptual metaphors grounded in Yoruba agriculture and traces their extensions across non-agricultural discourse domains in both rural and urban speech contexts. Findings are expected to reveal a rich and productive set of agricultural conceptual metaphors that remain active in contemporary Yoruba speech, with evidence of both preservation in rural contexts and creative urban adaptation. Recommendations will address cognitive linguistic documentation of Yoruba vocabulary and the integration of lexical creativity analysis into Yoruba language and literature programmes. Keywords: metaphorical extension, Yoruba agricultural vocabulary, lexical creativity, conceptual metaphor, cognitive semantics.