Yoruba pe and ki verbs or complementizers

Abstract

This paper discusses the Yoruba items Pe and K£. These items have sometimes been analyzed as verbs and sometimes as complementizers. Thus their status has not been clearly established. In this paper, we look at the various structures in which these items occur and at their behaviour and proceed to reanalyze them. In this re-examination attention is paid to the distributional criteria of both verbs and complementizers. The paper concludes that pe and k£ are complementizers not verbs.

Keywords

• Yoruba
• morphology
• complementizer
• verbs