About

I am a third-year PhD student in Linguistics at Yale University, where I explore the intricate connections between language structure and meaning. My academic journey began with a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics & Yoruba Language, followed by a Master’s degree in Yoruba Language from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. These foundational experiences deepened my passion for the morphosyntax and semantics of West African languages, particularly Yoruba, Igbo, and Nigerian Pidgin English NPE. My research is driven by a fascination with formal semantics and the interplay between natural languages and mathematical expressions. Under the guidance of Professor Veneeta Dayal and Prof. Jim Wood,my first Qualifying Paper, investigates Bare Nouns and Definiteness in Yoruba. This project reflects my broader interest in how languages encode meaning and how these systems can be formally modeled.

I am currently working on my second Qualifying Paper with Prof. Claire Bowern and Prof. Jim Wood. The project examines the tense–aspect–mood (TAM) systems of Yorùbá and Nigerian Pidgin English, with particular attention to the relationship between synthetic and analytic morphological expression. A long-standing view in the literature holds that the relative absence of synthetic morphology in creole TAM systems reflects grammatical simplicity. However, Yorùbá likewise expresses TAM primarily through analytic strategies rather than inflectional morphology, despite being a non-creole language with a rich and well-established grammatical system. This project therefore asks whether the lack of synthetic TAM morphology can genuinely be equated with structural simplicity, or whether analytic systems encode comparable levels of grammatical complexity through different morphosyntactic means.

Email: olabode.adedeji@yale.edu/ bodegreat@gmail.com