Negative Polarity Items in the Ao Dialect of Yoruba

Abstract

This paper discusses negative polarity items in the Ào dialect of Yorùbá, one of the three major languages spoken in Nigeria. Earlier works on the dialect revealed that it does not have independent negative markers unlike the situation in standard Yorùbá. However, in the dialect, some items have been identified which are inherently negative in that their occurrence in a construction and in most cases, in isolation, denotes negation. These are unrunkúnrun (‘nothing’), ọnikọ́ni (‘any person/no body’), urájékírájé (‘any person/useless person’), gédégédé (‘not at all’), and gbẹ́dọ̀ (‘must not’). They are referred to as negative polarity items in this work. We examine their distribution in this paper, vis-à-vis other functors that double as negative markers in the dialect.