Suchergebnisse

Divorce rates among the northern Yoruba are not only higher than one might expect in patrilineal societies, but little different from those of the southern Yoruba, with cognatic descent groups. This initial observation challenges the hypothesis that divorce rates are directly correlated with the line of descent. Data on over 300 divorces were collected in four Yoruba towns—two with agnatic and two with cognatic descent groups. The divorces were classed by the length of the terminated marriage and its fertility, and the distribution of the types of divorce were then compared in the four towns. The results suggest that the rate of divorce is primarily correlated with the degree to which a woman is alienated by marriage from her own descent group. But a number of secondary factors seem to be important, and these may cumulatively raise or reduce the divorce rate to a marked degree.

This thrust of this paper is identification and analysis of the major types of nominal compounds in both German and Yoruba languages. This is with a view to bringing out the differences and similarities that exist in the word formation processes of nominal compounds of the two languages under consideration. For the purpose of this analysis, 217nominal compounds (110 from Yoruba and 107 from German) were considered. The paper identified the types of nominal compounds in the two languages under consideration and discussed the peculiar morphosyntactic features leading to their formation. It was concluded that the nominal compounds from both languages have some linguistic characteristics in common. One of the major similarities in the two languages is the binary structure of their nominal compounds. This characteristic is evidently noticed even in compounds possessing more than two constituents. However, the nominal compounds in the two languages differ syntactically. While German maintains the Determiner – Determined word order, Yoruba however maintains the Determined - Determiner word order.Keywords: Contrastive Linguistics, Word Formation, Nominal Compounds