Rethinking the Syntax of Negation in Yoruba: A Minimalist Approach with Typological Implications

Negation is a grammatical universal with significant cross-linguistic structural variation, and Yoruba's negation system presents a set of properties, including a discontinuous negation pattern and negative concord phenomena, that challenge standard minimalist accounts. This dissertation rethinks the syntax of negation in Yoruba through a comprehensive minimalist programme analysis, making an original theoretical contribution by proposing a new derivational account of Yoruba NegP structure that explains previously unanalysed interactions between negation, focus, and aspect. The empirical research draws on grammaticality judgment experiments, corpus analysis of 15,000 negative clauses extracted from recorded naturalistic discourse in Oyo and Ekiti States, and cross-dialectal comparison with Ondo and Ijebu negation patterns. The theoretical framework is grounded in Chomsky's minimalist programme, Laka's theory of sentential negation, and Zanuttini's typological work on negative morphosyntax. Existing formal analyses of Yoruba negation have been conducted within non-minimalist frameworks or have not addressed the full range of negation constructions, including double negation, negative focus constructions, and negative concord environments. This dissertation provides the most comprehensive minimalist treatment of Yoruba negation to date, making an original formal contribution and generating typologically significant predictions about the relationship between tone, aspect, and negation in verb-object languages. Findings will demonstrate that the Yoruba NegP occupies a higher structural position than previously proposed, which accounts for the interaction effects observed with focus and wh-movement. Keywords: negation, Yoruba syntax, minimalist programme, NegP, typology.