The Afranaph Project: Anaphora in the African Languages

The Clausal Complementation Questionnaire (CCQ) is designed to begin the exploration of the clausal inventories and selection-meaning relations that obtain in a given language. Insofar as we want to establish a baseline for comparison, the CCQ does not aim to explore a particular language type, but instead is designed to uncover empirical issues of interest that will then be followed up in subsequent work. Moreover, the CCQ is itself broken into two parts. The first part, CCQ-A, aims to identify a wide range of clause-taking predicates and complement types. The second part, CCQ-B (still in development, 01/15/2012) explores the internal syntax of complement clause types by varying parameters internal to those clauses. Part 2 may be less standardized than Part 1 given that the set of clause types to explore should be somewhat delimited by the answers to Part 1. The third part (CCQ-C), (also still in development, 01/15/2012) works to identify what meanings obtains for a given predicate when it is associated with a given complement. This is achieved by means of inference tests, i.e., what inferences is the speaker or the predicate-experiencer committed to when the two are associated.

Consultants participating in the Clausal Complementation and Selection Project should expect follow-up with a new questionnaire as part of their work that leads to full remuneration (estimated at this time around $400). For the CCSP project directors, the answers to CCQ-A are not sufficient for analytic purposes, so the value of the data provided depends significantly on continuing participation in the follow-up process. However, when the secondary queries are completed, remuneration for full participation will be released. After a certain period of time, failure of the project directors to provide follow-up queries will make consultants eligible for immediate remuneration for the work completed (estimated $200). Right now, we are feeling our way through the whole process, so we don’t have standard policies, but our goal is to protect both our project researchers and our consultants from wasted effort.

It is hoped that consultants participating in this project will become involved in collaborative work reporting the empirical findings in an analytic paper to be published in the case file for his or her language on the Afranaph website.

You can access the Clausal Complementation and Selection Questionnaire here:  [pdf] [doc]