Abstract

Yoru ba people relish in interspersing their utterances with proverbs Hardly can a typical Yoru ba man or woman utter three sentences without putting in a proverb Hence Yoru ba say wel in r r l in we b r ba s nu o we la fi n wa translated to mean that proverb is the vehicle through which issues are resolved However Yoruba proverbs are not just strung together haphazardly they follow some particular syntactic rules of the grammar of the language These syntactic rules give some aesthetic values to proverbs usage in the languge This paper is set to discuss the various syntactic forms that many of the Yoru ba proverbs manifest We also look at the implication of the syntactic rules upon which these proverbs are hinged and how these rules are applied to structures to conform to the wellformedness condition of Yoruba grammatical sentences