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.

 

 

 

 

 

Home Board of Directors Static Content Staff Database Design: Alexis Dimitriadis
Last Updated on Monday, 02 June 2014 10:31
ImageThe online database that Afranaph uses is a customized version of a family of databases designed by Alexis Dimitriadis. Alexis worked closely with the Afranaph staff to adapt his design to our needs, bringing both his technological and linguistic skills to bear, a combination that has been indispensable for the success of our project.

Alexis Dimitriadis obtained his M.A. degree in Mathematics from Portland State University, and the Ph.D. degree in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a senior research associate at the Utrecht institute of Linguistics OTS. He has participated in several technology-related projects, including the Berlin-Utrecht Reciprocals Survey, for which the software behind the Afranaph database was developed, and the Typological Database System. His primary research interests include the semantics and typology of reciprocals, anaphoric and pronominal reference, Greek linguistics, and Bantu linguistics.

For more information about Alexis Dimitriadis, please contact him via email.