Construction schemas in Yoruba compounding: focus on personal names

Compounding is a common word-formation process in Yoruba which is instantiated by different compound structures and types. However, in Yoruba personal names, compounds may exhibit significant formal and semantic properties that reflect certain constructional schemas in grammar. Hence, using the framework of construction morphology, this paper examines various schemas in Yoruba compound personal names and the internal features of these schemas. Based on data collected from personal interviews and native speaker intuition, I show that Yoruba personal names are constructions involving complex structural schemas which constitute a form-meaning pair where there are internal features that are not only semantic but syntactic and phonological. Furthermore, the paper reveals that several compound patterns may occur in Yoruba names including N-N, N-V, V-N, N-A and N-Av and that phonological processes in these schemas may be unique to the name constructions.