Different criteria are used by scholars to identify the nouns of Yorùbá, a language spoken in south-western Nigeria. However, complexities and difficulties resulting from these criteria differences have posed serious problems to corpus knowledge extraction useful for ontological annotations. Reconciling the differences with a simple model which dwells on semantic load of the lexicon is a gap in Yorùbá language scholarship. This study extracts some selected controversial Yorùbá noun from Awobuluyi (1978 & 2013), using Qualia structure (QS) of Generative Lexicon - a model containing parameters which focuses on the dist/ributed nature of compositionality to analyse the lexical noun, proposed by Pustejovsky (1991a). The paper reveals that the manner nouns [kíákíá and wéréwéré (quickly)], and polymorphic nouns [mo (I), mi (me), o (you), ó (he/she), ìre̩ (you), irè̩ (him/her), wo̩n (them)] items classified as noun by Awobuluyi are inconsistent and/or incompatible with the QS used and therefore cannot be modelled as noun, because they lack independently the qualia properties required of nouns. The study therefore concludes that simple descriptive analysis is efficiently enough grammar needed for ontological annotations.

Keywords: Lexical semantics, Yorùbá nouns, Ontological annotation, Generative lexicon, Lexical relations