A Comparative Study of Morphologically Constructed Agent Nouns in French and Yoruba

Abstract

It is widely believed that a very large number of word forms in many languages are traceable to the outputs of morphological processes which broadly include affixation, compounding and reduplication. In this paper, we carry out a comparative analysis of agent noun formation rules in French and in Yoruba using Lexeme-Base Morphology model. Our findings show that while French employs suffixation and compounding, Yoruba makes use of prefixation and reduplication. The study also reveals that both languages demonstrate similar phonological, syntactic and semantic traits relating to the agent noun production.