A re-examination of 'bẹ́ẹ̀ kọ́' as a negative ‘no’ answer to yes-no questions in Yorùbá

Abstract

Existing scholarship tends to reproduce the inherited descriptive label bẹ́ẹ̀ ni–bẹ́ẹ̀ kọ́ as the canonical pair of answers for yes–no questions. However, empirical evidence suggests that contemporary Yorùbá speakers employ a wider range of negative responses. This study offers a critical reassessment of the entrenched descriptive pairing bẹ́ẹ̀ ni–bẹ́ẹ̀ kọ́ in Yorùbá grammatical discourse. To address this, the study draws on data elicited from competent native speakers and supplements them with naturally occurring instances from Yorùbá films and classical and contemporary written texts. These data are analyzed using the Wider Distribution and Preference Criteria—newly formulated in this research as analytical mechanisms for selecting among competing lexical items with equivalent semantic functions. Findings show that rárá, rather than bẹ́ẹ̀ kọ́, serves as the most contextually versatile, pragmatically neutral, and statistically dominant negative response across discourse contexts. In contrast, bẹ́ẹ̀ kọ́ occurs only in restricted rhetorical or contrastive environments, limiting its suitability as the default negative correlate. Consequently, the study argues that the long-standing label bẹ́ẹ̀ ni–bẹ́ẹ̀ kọ́ is descriptively and empirically inadequate and should be replaced with bẹ́ẹ̀ ni–rárá, a formulation that more aptly captures the polarity system of contemporary Yorùbá and rectifies a long-standing mischaracterization in the descriptive tradition.