Focus Constructions and Relative Clauses in Ànàgó

This paper looks at focus constructions and relative clauses in Ànàgó, a dialect of Yoruba spoken in Ipokia, Ipokia Local Government of Ogun State, Nigeria, paying particular attention to the structural properties and strategies of focus construction and relative clause formation. It is not in doubt that extensive work has been done on the topics in the standard version of the speech form; little can be said of same in relation to Ànàgó, particularly as it concerns the formal similarities and differences between focus constructions and relative clauses. In lights of the foregoing, this paper presents a comprehensive account of the markers for focus expressions and relative clauses in Ànàgó. The analysis of the data with insights from the minimalist program shows that subject focus and possessive focus involve resumptive pronouns while object focus and object relativisation employ a gap strategy. However, there is no movement effect when nominalised forms of verbs are focused or relativised. The two constructions are distinguishable based on co-occurrence principle, what licenses the movement or displacement and the internal structures of each of them.