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.

 

 

 

 

 

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Last Updated on Thursday, 31 August 2023 09:50

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Getting Started

If you decide you are interested in participating in our project as a consultant, we urge you to begin by deciding which questionnaire you would like to begin with. Naturally, consultants will tend to look first at the questionnaires for the projects that interest them, but just for comparison, we recommend that you look at more than one. Some questionnaires will make much greater demands on your time than others, and if you would like to begin by answering one of the less time-consuming ones, then consult the About Compensation page where the schedule of fees reflects our estimation of which projects are likely to be the most time-consuming. The AQ, for example, for which we offer the most compensation, is very long and detailed and so it is important to assess how much is expected before you make a commitment.

While linguistic training is required, the main effects of that training that is pertinent to filling out the AQ is that you need to be sensitive to matters of grammar in your language, you need to be able to provide a thoughtful morpheme breakdown and gloss (according to our Glossing Conventions), and that you have a sense of what a linguist might be interested in knowing. Although it is rare, some people have this latter sense with little training, but the AQ is not designed with naive native speakers in mind, and moreover, the level of commitment required is more typical of those who have a professional interest in matters of grammar.

When you have made these assessments, then please contact us by email (Contact Us) and let us know which project or projects you would like to answer questionnaires for. In your first message, please also tell us a bit about yourself, including a brief account of your linguistic training, the language(s) you speak natively, your affiliation, if you have one, and how we may most conveniently maintain contact with you. At some point, before we can use any data you send us, you must fill out the Consultant Information and Consent Form, which includes this information and more, and once you have filled it out once, you don’t have to fill out again for participation in any new sister project. We will then put you in touch with the investigators for the Afranaph Sister Project that the questionnaire is for (if you are not already in touch, or have come to us through them). Thereafter, most of your contact will be with project investigators for each of the sister projects you are answering a questionnaire for.

As soon as it is agreed between us that you will become a consultant for Afranaph, please go to the Consultant’s Page, which provides necessary documents and includes a variety of instructions designed to simplify your experience and standardize, as much as possible, the procedures for presenting data to us.


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