A Lexico-syntactic Analysis of Selected Dialects of Yoruba Language in Nigeria

The study was on comparative study of Ondo and Ikale dialects of the Yoruba language with a view to finding the areas of convergences and divergences between the two dialects. The study was based on 50 sentences from each of the dialects, but only 25 of the sentences were presented. They were anaylsed from the perspective of Halliday Systemic Function Grammar (SFG) in order to identify the prominent lexemes and syntactic structures of the sentences. Simple statistics based on percentages was used to calculate the number of lexemes and structures that are similar and different. It was discovered that the two dialects have basically the same lexemes at both subject and predicator levels. This shows that the speakers of the two dialects often make use of the same nominal and verbal items in their speeches. Besides, the two dialects share basically the same syntactic components – Subjects, Predicator, Complement and Adjunct in all the sentences examined, but the Adjunct is rarely used in the dialects. The dialects are however, found to be mainly different in the area of auxiliary verbs usage. Most of the words or lexemes in the dialects are found in the standard Yoruba, hence the mutual intelligibility of the dialects to an average Yoruba language native speaker. It is thus envisaged that other dialects of Yoruba language that are geographically close may equally share similar linguistic features and cultural norms. Key words: Yoruba Language, Ondo, Ikale and Dialects.