The current scope and configuration of our project and our web site are in line with the nature of our funding up to now and the limited resources that we have been able to call upon, but if additional funding is obtained, there are some natural extensions of our current project that we hope to pursue as aggressively as we can.

Data gathering

• We are always on the lookout for those who might be willing to participate in our project as native speaker linguist consultants. Some hear of our project through the occasional e-mail solicitations we send out and others have met our representatives at conferences, but many consultants have come to us through personal contact or word of mouth. This has so far been enough to keep us busy, but with the introduction of the new website and database, we now have the infrastructure to work on more languages at once, and we can set a clearer example of what we are trying to achieve with the data that we collect. As a result, we expect to make greater efforts to publicize our project in the future with a view toward attracting both new consultants and researchers who can use our resources.

• We will devise new questionnaires for other aspects of anaphora (a logophoricity questionnaire developed by Oluseye Adesola and Ken Safir is in the works), but we will also commission questionnaires that explore other well-studied, compact empirical domains that have been known to vary in interesting ways, such as the nature of question constructions or the nature of clausal complementation for similar verb types across our language sample, and so forth.

• We expect to organize workshops to explore new directions for Afranaph, including projects to be initiated by the site (such as new studies based on our elicitation techniques and network) and new features that could be developed for the site.

• It seems a long way off just now, but we hope that audio files will eventually be added to our case files. In addition to important information about intonation that can influence anaphoric interpretation or the acceptability of phrases, well-developed audio files may also be a resource for phonologists interested in some of the languages in our case files.

Researcher Network Formation

• We are developing lists of linguist consultants who are willing to be contacted by other researchers with questions about their language. In this way it may eventually be possible to have several consultants available for those researchers interested in initiating intra-language or crosslinguistic research. It is one of the goals of the Afranaph project to encourage researchers to make use of our research and our network of consultants for projects we do not initiate, and we will be happy to provide organizational support for projects of this kind (contingent on our level of funding). In other words, we expect our research platform to be flexible enough to serve the interests of anyone who has a good idea about what can insightfully be investigated using our resources, including phonological or semantic phenomena.

• When we have grown enough to have many active users, we will open a chat room for the members of the community we serve, in order to facilitate interaction and draw together researchers with common interests.

• We hope to develop a software library of open source materials that our users can download for their projects, including tree diagram programs, fonts, other forms of graphic representation, etc., and perhaps more ambitious analytic tools for speech recognition and data analysis. Participants in the project would make themselves available as references so that someone unfamiliar with a particular program could ask the listed reference person for advice on how to download it, install it and use it.

• We hope to develop formal ties with sister projects using similar database designs, including a sister project at the University of Utrecht.

Additional Features

• As our project grows and new work employs some of our data base, occasional papers will be published on the site as a series of technical reports connected with our project. An initial paper is already in the works.

• Our site already includes useful links to other web sites in appropriate places throughout the site, but we expect to add links that our users bring to our attention, and if it seems useful, we may include brief descriptions of the relevant sites on our Links page.