Abstract

This research focuses on the morphological analysis of Yoruba sentential names. It also identifies names and their meaning in Yoruba language, since Yoruba people believe that the names are ways of gaining knowledge. Many works have been carried out on Yoruba names but none talked about the internal structure of the names. Data for this research were collected through interviews with Yoruba male and female speakers including educated and uneducated native speakers of Yoruba language, information from the library, journals and other interactive textbooks. The theoretical framework adopted for this study is as presented by Bertrand Russell (1970) which is the basis linguistic theory, which is a descriptive approach to the study of language. Names reveal peoples hope, expectation, aspiration philosophies, fear, and anxieties. Names tend to have meaning and convey specific message to the hearers. The research also reveals the morphsyntactic interaction between the names and the syntactic structure in different positions that it’s occupied in its findings. This research has attempted to provide as suitable method that would indicate the complexities involved in the use of Yoruba personal names