Staff for the African Anaphora Project
Director: Ken Safir, Ph.D.
Ken Safir is a professor in the department of linguistics at Rutgers University, a department he helped to found in 1989, seven years after receiving his Ph.D. from MIT. He is a linguistic theorist and syntactician with interests in the syntax-semantics interface and the nature of linguistic of anaphora in particular. He is just completing a ten year term as editor of the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, of which he was also one of the founding editors. Professor Safir has studied definiteness effects, the null subject parameter, crossover effects, small clauses, parasitic gaps, the structure of nominals and relative clauses and many other phenomena, but in recent years the focus of his work has been on the locality and interpretation of anaphoric relations and the connection between these relations and the morphology of anaphors, as evidenced by many of his recent publications, including The Syntax of Anaphora, published in 2004 by Oxford University Press, and The Syntax of (In)Dependence, published by MIT Press, also in 2004. A third book on questions of anaphora is in the works, and additional recent articles are available for download at his website.
Assistant Director: Oluseye Adesola, Ph.D.
Oluseye provides oversight support for the Anaphora in the African Languages project. He supervises the caseworkers and liaises with the consultants. His research interests include Yoruba Studies, Comparative Syntax, African Culture and Literature, African Linguistics, Syntactic Theory, Anaphora, Wh-movement Constructions and Focus Constructions.For more information, see his website.
Research Assistant: Michael C. O'Keefe
Michael is a graduate student in the department of linguistics at Rutgers University. He helps with product organization, management of data, and communicating with the caseworkers. His primary research interests are in phonology, specifically tone, stress, and learnability, and in syntax, specifically reciprocals and anaphora. For more information, please visit his website.
Software Developer: Sarah E. Murray
Sarah is a graduate student in Linguistics at Rutgers University. She helps with project organization, communicating with the caseworkers, and development of the new website. Her primary research interests are in formal semantics, focusing on evidentials, the many varieties of anaphora (modal, temporal, in discourse, etc.), and fieldwork (Cheyenne). For more information, please visit her website.
Previous Staff
Research Assistants
Sarah E. Murray
Jessica Rett
Case Workers
Seunghun Lee, Rutgers University
Xiao Li, Rutgers University
Sophia A. Malamud, University of Pennsylvania
Andre Nuendel, Rutgers University
James Thompson, Rutgers University and UBC, Canada