The Afranaph Project: Anaphora in the African Languages

The main goal of the Afranaph Project, as it is presently constituted, is to develop rich descriptions of a wide range of African languages in order to serve the interests of linguistic research into the nature and distribution of empirical patterns in natural language. The first project of our website, and still the one that is the mainstay of our research, has been to explore the distribution of anaphoric morphology and interpretation, but recent initiatives to expand the role of our empirical investigations to other sorts of linguistic phenomena will soon result in sister projects, autonomous, but linked to Afranaph in spirit, by infrastructure, and with respect to a common database.

In order to provide optimal access to the data we have elicited, the Afranaph Database was designed to permit online search and manipulation of the data stored in the extensive responses to our various questionnaires and the additional data elicited in follow-up inquiries. In those domains and for those languages for which we have complete data sets, the database permits fine-grained searches to aid in the analysis of both language-internal and crosslinguistic generalizations.

We are pleased to announce that the Kinande Dictionary Fund has achieved its goal! In December, 2011, 550 copies of the Kinande/Konzo-English Dictionary were shipped to Kampala, Uganda by the Africa World Press and eventually reached the hands of our distributors there. We would like to thank everyone involved for their assistance, including the Endangered Language Fund, which handled our donations.

The Multi-portal Design

For example, the Anaphora Portal includes the language and sentence entities that all the portals include, but also an entity called ‘anaphoric marker’. Anaphora Project researchers determine what the anaphoric markers are in a given language and what properties they have (according to our Database Property Attribution Guide). The Anaphora Portal includes search options that return sets of anaphoric markers based on their properties, in addition to searches that return sets of sentences or sets of languages. You can browse the database or use the search form to find languages, anaphoric markers or sentences of interest.

All of the portals have the same basic design, though the sets of analytic entities differ. At this writing, there are three portals: The Anaphora Portal, the Clausal Complementation Portal and the Generic Portal. The Generic Portal only permits searches for sentences and languages, but the browse page for any language will display all of the analytic entities that are otherwise unique to other portals. Anyone with an interest in languages for which we have data can search our basic sentence data using the Generic Portal with their own agenda in mind, ignoring any categorizations of the specific projects beyond our basic conventions of glossing and morpheme breakdown.

The Clausal Complementation portal has different analytic entities than the Anaphora Portal and thus permits searches that the other portals do not. Thus while research groups can organize data as they see fit, and design properties for entities that help them in their research, all of the sentence data collected for any project expands what is available in all the portals. For practical information about using the multi-portal design features in your research, go to About the Database

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Contact The Project:

Ken Safir, Director
Afranaph Project

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
18 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Phone: 732.932.7289
Fax: 732.932.1370
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.