Morphophonological Deviation in Yoruba: Its Implication for Communication

Abstract

This paper examines the morphophonological violation of the linguistic rules of Yoruba especially by the literary artists in their attempt to achieve communicative aesthetics. Through observational method, we discovered that they manipulate the morphophonological resources of the language without a second thought on its implication for communication. In the work, we discover that this deliberate deviation from the linguistic norms of the everyday language do have some consequences (i) it may lead to ambiguity (ii) it often leads to derivation of a new words which may be out of context with the discussion at stake (iii) it could be for the ease of speech production (iv) it is also noticeable in ordinary discourse as against some views that it is only manifested in the literary discourse (v) it is capable of constituting communicative difficulty to the language learners.

Keywords: morphology, phonology, deviation process, derivation, communicative aesthetics, literary discourse