Word formation and structural peculiarities of nouns in Yoruba language

This paper undertakes a linguistic analysis of various processes that are involved in word formation in Yoruba language. The lexical expansion capacities of Yoruba language in its noun forms are critically analyzed to show its morphological peculiarities. It was found that much emphasis is placed on the phonemic tones of the word in Yoruba language during morphological encodings. In this paper, it is proved that like in most languages, various morphological processes are used in Yoruba to boost the internal structures of the wordforms and augment their semantic values. Observably, a wide range of methods are used in the process including composition (combination, putting together components that can also be used as independent units), derivation (words are formed with the use of affixes especially suffixes) and prefixation (word-formation by means of prefixes).