Prof. Oladiipo Ajiboye

Professor Oladiipo Ajiboye

Ọladiipọ Ajiboye (Ph.D.), fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies on African Humanities Program ACLS/AHP) and Member of Nigerian Academic of Letters (MNAL), is a revered Professor of Linguistics and Yoruba Language at the University of Lagos, Nigeria with close to three decades’ worth of experience as a teacher and researcher. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics from the University of Ilorin in 1983. In 1989, he obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the University of Ilorin and a master’s degree in Yoruba Language in 1992 in the same University and bagged his doctoral degree in Linguistics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada in 2006. He has been teaching theoretical linguistics and Yorùbá language, especially phonology and syntax, and their interface to undergraduate and graduate students in various Universities from the early 1990s to date. In addition, he is a seasoned scholar who has attended more than forty conferences both locally and internationally. His doctoral training at the University of British Columbia, Canada, numerous lectures and scholarly articles, and collaboration in local and international research with scholars in Nigeria, Africa, North America, and Europe are useful experiences that fed and shaped his thoughts on this outstanding scholarly work. Professor Ajiboye has made several breakthroughs in Yorùbá language study, which include analyzing a Yorùbá count noun as bare, which may be construed as indefinite, definite, or generic, proposing a Determiner Phrase (DP) structure for it. The author is also the first to treat Yorùbá as a language that syntactically marks its nouns as plural with non-dedicated plural words; the first to propose a genitive phrase headed by the mid-toned vowel found between the two noun phrases; the first to draw parallels between the mid-toned elements in nominal domains and high-toned elements in verbal domains; the first to debunk the claim that the deictic elements: kan and náà are determiners, rather he treats them as a specificity and salient markers respectively among others. Professor Ajiboye has 66 publications as papers in peer-reviewed journals and chapters in books, and 10 books, which cut across linguistics, literature, history, and culture to his credit.