Afranaph Sister Projects- Last Updated on Thursday, 31 August 2023 14:15
Beginning in 2012 and ever since, several new research initiatives based on the Afranaph infrastructure, methodology, consultant network and open access database have been developed as central to our current practice.
Each Afranaph sister project addresses a particular theoretical problem or set of issues, defines 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) is organized by a researcher or a group of researchers who share an interest in a specific set of issues. The ASPs contribute to the Afranaph Project by adding 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. Some ASPs will have their own search page portal for the common database is 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. For example, there are search parameters not on the Anaphora Portal that are found on the Clausal Complementation Portal and vice versa, reflecting tagging more specific to one ASP as opposed to another. Decision about how the portal is designed, as well as how the questionnaire is designed, are made by the ASP researchers in consultation with the PI. Each ASP has its own webpage on our site. It is our hope that ASPs will find independent funding that will also support Afranaph infrastructure, though this is not required.
Links to the webpages for the ASPs we currently support are listed below. However, only the first two are currently active. Another research project, based on the argument structure of nominals, is in development.
• The African Anaphora Project
• The Clausal Complementation and Selection Project
• Situating the Subject in Bantu
• DP Positions in African Languages
• The Morphosyntax of Bantu Nouns
• Tense and Aspect in African Languages
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.
