Essentials of Yoruba Grammar

Book excerpt: In important respects, this book represents an independent approach to Yoruba grammar. It attempts to present the Yoruba language as it really is, rather than as seen largely from the perspective of other languages. The grammatical structure of the language is thus presented in a new way. The major parts of speech of the language are, for the first time, established uniformly on the criteria of function alone. A chapter is devoted to a systematic and novel treatment of each such part of speech, related both to the wide array of sentence types, and to its sounds and the way they are combined in words.