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.

 

 

 

 

 

More on the Anaphora Portal

A particular anaphoric marker in Lubukusu, for example, is AGR-ene and details about that marker can be found on the Lubukusu browse page. Formulating anaphoric markers as an entity type is significant for research on anaphora because one can find all of the anaphoric markers in the database that are verb affix reciprocals, for example, or all of the languages that have verb affix reciprocals, or all of the sentences that have such reciprocals, or all of the sentences (in one language, many, or all) that have such markers. This portal is a slight revision of the original AD database.