Abstract
This study addresses the relative lack of scholarly attention to topic constructions in Yorùbá, with particular focus on Ọ̀họ̀rí, a Yorùbá dialect spoken in WestYorùbá areas (Oyelaran 1976, Adeniyi 2000), specifically Kétu and its surrounding communities in Yewa North Local Government Area of Ogun State, Nigeria. Data for the study were elicited from twelve native speakersof Ọ̀họ̀rí drawn from Kétu, Asá, and Ègùwá. The analysis is framed within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky1995, 1998, 2002) and theory of Information Structure (Halliday 1994; Erteschik-Shir 2007; van der Wal et al. 2025). The findings show that a wide range of constituents, including noun phrases, tense phrases, and conditional clauses, can undergo topicalisation in Ọ̀họ̀rí. The study also examines the syntactic positions of topic elements, drawing on the regions identified in Bamgbọṣe (1990), and proposes two structural representations for topic projections in the dialect. Finally, the paper discusses the semantics of topic constructions in Ọ̀họ̀rí Yorùbá, an aspect that has received little or no attention in existing Yorùbá linguistic literature.
Keywords: Information Structure, Ọ̀họ̀rí, Projections, Topic Elements, Semantics,
