The Afranaph Project: Anaphora in the African Languages

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Last Updated on Wednesday, 21 September 2016 10:54

Since the Afranaph Project Development Workshop in December, 2010, several new research initiatives to be based on the Afranaph infrastructure, methodology, consultant network and open access database have been in development, and now, in January 2012, they are ready to be launched.

Each Afranaph sister project will address a particular theoretical problem or set of issues and define an empirical realm that bears on those issues and that can be profitably studied by exploring African languages (generally, or specific subfamilies, such as Bantu). Each Afranaph sister project (ASP) will be autonomous, organized by those who share an interest in a specific set of issues, and will collaborate with Afranaph by sharing resources, but all ASPs will add their sentence elicitation data to the Afranaph database, creating an ever expanding searchable resource for those interested in broader investigations and comparisons for languages in the Afranaph family of projects.

Each ASP has the opportunity to ask to contact current Afranaph consultants for new elicitations, in the form of a questionnaire designed by the ASP, exploring the empirical realms of interest to the ASP in question. Initial funding to support native speaker linguistic consultants for their questionnaire responses will be borne by Afranaph. Sentence data collected by ASPs will be entered into the general Afranaph database, fully tagged for certain general search parameters, along with the usual full gloss, morpheme breakdown and translation. However each ASP will have its own search page portal for the common database which will be designed to have the search parameters relevant to that particular ASP, i.e., the initial search page for the Afranaph Project proper will be different from the initial search page of a particular ASP, and there will be search parameters not on the Afranaph page that are found on the ASP page and vice versa, reflecting tagging more specific to one ASP as opposed to another. Most likely, each ASP will maintain its own webpage, make its own personnel decisions, and ultimately be supported by its own funding.

Links to the provisional webpages for the ASPs we currently support are listed below. The African Anaphora Project, now the oldest of the Afranaph sisters, is not yet listed among them, since it is still the default for the database until portals for the other projects are functional (they are currently under construction and some of them should be open in May, 2012).
The ASPs we have initiated so far are, we hope, only the beginning, but click here if you are interesting in developing your own Afranaph Sister Project, and click here if you would like to become a consultant for some or any of the ASPs.