Semantic Roles and Argument Structure in Yoruba Ditransitive Verbs

The structure of ditransitive constructions reveals fundamental properties of a language's argument realisation principles, thematic role assignment, and the interface between syntax and semantics. This study investigates semantic roles and argument structure in Yoruba ditransitive verbs, examining how verbs encoding giving, sending, teaching, and showing events distribute thematic roles across subject, direct object, and indirect object positions. Data were collected through elicitation, grammaticality judgement tasks, and corpus analysis involving 50 native Yoruba speakers from Oyo and Lagos States, South West Nigeria. The study applies role and reference grammar and construction grammar frameworks, supplemented by Yoruba-specific morphosyntactic analysis. Existing research on Yoruba argument structure has examined serial verb constructions extensively but has devoted comparatively less systematic attention to the properties of double-object constructions and their alternations with prepositional dative constructions. This study fills that theoretical gap. The research investigates whether Yoruba ditransitive constructions involve movement operations or base-generated argument positions, what thematic role restrictions apply to goals, recipients, and themes in ditransitive frames, and whether animacy and definiteness effects observed in English ditransitive alternations are replicated in Yoruba. Findings are expected to demonstrate that Yoruba exhibits a robust double-object construction with animacy restrictions on recipient arguments and limited alternation options compared to English. Recommendations will address the integration of argument structure theory into advanced Yoruba linguistic analysis curricula and the development of a Yoruba-specific semantic role inventory. Keywords: semantic roles, argument structure, Yoruba ditransitive verbs, construction grammar, syntax-semantics interface.