Conference
All participants will receive their conference materials either upon check-in at the hotel or at the reception on Thursday, December 12. This includes a schedule of the workshop and abstracts for all talks, as well as a campus map and visitors' guides with information on local restaurants. The reception will be held at 5pm at the Linguistics Department, Room 230: Poulton Hall, 1421 37th Street NW, Washington, DC 20057.
Participants receiving per diem payments should contact Ruth Kramer (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or Conor Sinclair (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) directly to arrange for payment during the conference.
Please contact the department if you have any questions at 202-687-5956
From the Hyatt to Van Dyke Hall (16 Seminary Place): Turn left on Albany Street. Turn Right on George Street and continue two blocks to Hamilton Street. Turn left on Hamilton and continue half a block to the pedestrian crossing. Cross Hamilton and continue straight, past Scott Hall. Van Dyke Hall is the third building on your left. Enter through the main door and go up the stairs to the second floor. Room 201 is on the left.
To the Linguistics Department (18 Seminary Place): Follow the directions to Van Dyke Hall. Proceed past Van Dyke. The Linguistics Department is a yellowish house, the next building on your left.
From the Train Station to the Linguistics Department: Exit the train station and turn right on Easton Avenue. Turn right at the first light onto Somerset Street. Turn left onto College Avenue for two blocks. Turn right to Seminary place. The department is at 18 Seminary Place, which is a yellowish house on your right.
Shuttle Service: Shuttle Service between the Hyatt and the Linguistics Department for the Thursday reception will leave at 5:10 PM and return to the Hyatt at 7:10 PM. Shuttle service will also be available from the Hyatt on Friday morning at 8:40 AM. No shuttles are available to return from to the Hyatt on Friday or on Saturday.
Parking: If you are driving to the workshop, please come to the Linguistics Department (18 Seminary Place) to pick up a one-day visitor's parking pass. From there you will be directed to a lot.
Afranaph Project Development Workshop II
Rutgers University, December 12-14, 2013 – Tentative schedule
Click on any title in the schedule below to see an extended abstract for the talk.
All abstracts (alphabetical by first author) can also be downloaded here.
Thursday, December 12
Reception at Department of Linguistics, 5:00-6:30
Friday, December 13
9:20 Welcome - Dean of Humanities, Rutgers University
9:30 Ken Safir, Rutgers University - The Afranaph Project: Where we are and where we might go
9:45 Vicki Carstens, University of Missouri - On DP positions and the location of subjects: Report on two Sister Projects
10:25 Coffee break
10:40 Sylvester Ron Simango - Rhodes University - Pastness, `Persistence’ and Tense/Aspect in African Languages: Report on the Tense and Aspect Project
11:20 Ibirahim Njoya, University of Hamburg/Asien-Afrika-Institut - Interaction between tense-mood-aspect and negation in Makaa (A83)
11:55 David Langa, Universidade Edoardo Mondlane, and Tarald Taraldsen, University of Tromsø - Conjunctive and disjunctive verb forms
12:30-2:00 Lunch
2:00 Justine Sikuku - Moi University - Possessive Constructions in African Languages
2:35 Blasius Achiri, University of Buea - The definite article and its range of definiteness in Moghambo
3:10 Break
3:25 Ken Safir and Mark Baker, Rutgers University - Towards a principled approach to clausal complementation and selection
4:05 Patricia Cabredo Hofherr - CNRS/Paris-8 & Surrey Morphology Group - Antecedentless subjects: Impersonal constructions and passives
4:40 Hilda Koopman, UCLA - Pooling resources: linking Afranaph and SSWL/Terraling and developing a semi automated questionnaire
5:25 End of day
Saturday, December 14
9:30 Ken Safir and Naga Selvanathan, Rutgers University - The Anaphora Sister Project: Transitive reciprocal constructions
10:10 Pius Akumbu, University of Buea - Competing Babanki anaphors
10:45 Break
11:05 Patricia Schneider-Zioga, California State University, Fullerton, and Ngessimo Mutaka, University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon - Linkers in Kinande
11:40 Mark Baker, Rutgers University and Ruth Kramer, Georgetown University - The morphosyntax of applicative markers in Amharic
12:15 Mamadou Bassene and Ken Safir, Rutgers University - Verb stems in Eegamaa: The syntax of the verbal spine
12:50-2:15 Lunch
2:15 Business meeting and discussion
2:45 Break
3:00 Hermann Keupdjio, Universit of British Columbia - Wh-movement, remnant movement and clause typing in Mə́dûmbà
3:35 Mamadou Bassene, Rutgers University – Mixed categories in Jóola Eegamaa derived nominals
4:10 David Langa, Universidade Edoardo Mondlane, and Tarald Taraldsen, University of Tromsø - Secondary nominal prefixes in Bantu
4:40 - End of day
7:00 Conference Dinner
All participants will receive their conference materials at the reception on Thursday, December 12. This includes a schedule of the workshop and abstracts for all talks, as well as a campus map and visitors' guides with information on local restaurants. The reception will be held at 5pm at the Linguistics Department: 18 Seminary Place, New Brunswick NJ 08901.
Participants receiving per diem payments should contact Ken Safir (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) directly to arrange for payment during the conference.
Please contact the department if you have any questions at 732-932-7289.
Afranaph Project Development Workshop 2
December 12-14, 2013 - Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Call for Papers
The Afranaph Project, which was originally designed to explore empirical patterns of anaphoric phenomena in the languages of Africa, has expanded its empirical scope, using the infrastructure developed in the last nine years, to initiate explorations in other domains of grammar in the languages of Africa and perhaps beyond. The purpose of this workshop is to encourage the development of research that exploits our data and our database, to consider proposals for new domains of research that suit our methodology and resources, and to bring together those who have worked on the project or the languages that are studied in it and to consider how best to develop the project over the next several years as a platform for research into new empirical domains.
We envision a workshop conference involving linguistic theorists, linguists specializing in comparative African linguistics, and native speaker language consultants already working with our project (with the understanding that these are usually overlapping categories). Three sorts of conference presentations are appropriate to our goals.
A) Proposals for new research topics (NRT) to be developed in collaboration with Afranaph. See the guidelines and opportunities for NRT proposals below.
B) Papers on any linguistic topic that in some way exploits our existing Afranaph resources.
C) Papers that explore topics that include the analysis of languages that are currently explored in posted Afranaph resources.
Additionally, there will probably be progress reports from each of the existing Afranaph Sister Projects, but these will be by invitation. All NRT proposals should be sent with two copies, one with your name, presentation title and affiliation on it, and the other without any name or affiliation, just the title.
Most of the NRT papers will ultimately be invited based on pre-conference interactions as described below, but we stress that we are prepared to consider NRT presentations from researchers we currently do not know, if they initiate conversations with us about the projects they would like to develop. Papers that fall into the other two categories will be accepted based on the result of competitive abstract evaluation (though it does not hurt to contact us before submitting to test the waters). Approximately 10-12 papers will be selected for presentation at the workshop in addition to the 3-4 NRT papers. The NRT presentations will be 45 minutes long with 15 minutes for questions and the other talks will be 30 minutes long with 10 minutes for questions. It is possible that we may be able to have a poster session as well which will provice an additional 8-10 places, depending on how many submissions we get.
The Submission Deadline for all abstracts, including NRT abstracts, is May 24 and decisions will be made no later than June 15. The early deadline is designed to provide time for those who may need lead time to acquire visas. Money is available to support travel and lodging for most conference participants, but the amounts available may or may not be enough to fully cover travel and lodging, depending on how many selected participants are traveling from a considerable distance. We do not expect to be able to offer funding for those presenting posters, barring a very pleasant surprise.
Abstracts should not exceed two pages including examples and references and must be in 10pt type or larger. Please submit your abstract electronically to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or mail your abstract so it arrives by May 24, 2013 to Department of Linguistics, Rutgers University, 18 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1184.
Our present plan is for the APDW-2 abstracts only to be electronically published on the Afranaph site, but alternative plans for publication will also be discussed at the workshop.
More on NRT abstracts
NRT presentations should be research proposals that draw attention to empirical domains relevant to active questions in linguistic investigation and the topic should be a good match for our elicitation methodology, our network of native speaker linguist consultants, and our dissemination infrastructure (i.e., the website and the database). In the latter regard, NRT proposals must show thoughtful familiarity with the Afranaph site and database. Those interested in submitting a proposal of this kind must contact us well in advance for assistance in formulating their proposal (including help exploring our resources and their limits. We will consider between 3-4 proposals of this kind for presentation at the conference.
After the workshop, two or three NRT proposals will be selected for further development of pilot projects to be supported by Afranaph. If funding permits, presenters of the selected proposals will be invited back for a small workshop in Spring, 2014 to sharpen the new research goals, to develop elicitation materials, to consider issues of database design relevant to the new research, and perhaps to participate in trial elicitations, all with an eye toward helping participants develop their own larger proposals for new outside funding.
