A Generative Account of Wh-Movement and Island Constraints in Yoruba: Theoretical and Typological Implications

This study develops a generative syntactic account of wh-movement and island constraints in Yoruba, contributing original theoretical analysis to the cross-linguistic study of extraction phenomena in Kwa languages. The syntactic analysis of wh-constructions and their sensitivity to extraction islands in Yoruba presents unresolved problems for current minimalist theory, and the language's typological significance as a head-marking, SVO, tonal Kwa language makes it a critical test case for universalist syntactic claims. The research employs a formal generative methodology within the Minimalist Program, combining empirical data from structured grammaticality judgment tasks administered to 50 native Yoruba speakers in Ibadan with formal syntactic modelling. The analysis examines wh-in-situ constructions, overt wh-fronting contexts, adjunct island effects, complex NP constraints, and the interaction of extraction with tonal morphological processes in the verbal domain. Findings document a partial rather than categorical island sensitivity in Yoruba wh-extraction, with complex NP constraints holding robustly while adjunct island effects show speaker variation attributable to discourse factors. The study proposes a Phase-based analysis incorporating an overt Focus head in the left periphery to account for the cross-construction distribution of wh-expressions in Yoruba. The theoretical contribution advances the understanding of parametric variation in the left periphery and challenges simplistic universalist accounts of island sensitivity. Keywords: generative syntax, wh-movement, island constraints, Yoruba, Minimalist Program.