The Afranaph Project: Anaphora in the African Languages

The Afranaph website and database may be accessed freely for the purpose of carrying out scientific research, subject to the usual rules for fair use and scientific attribution. The authors and editors retain copyright over its contents (in particular, redistribution of the database or its contents is not allowed without the express permission of the editors).

Although our static resources have version numbers, the database is still under construction, and therefore in a state of flux. When it is updated, we do not, at present, plan to indicate this in terms of version numbers, although the site blog will often report major revisions or the addition of new material. The contents of the database may in the future be restructured, expanded with new data, or revised to correct errors. Please use due caution in interpreting the data found here. Where the native speaker linguist consultants have provided contact details, we encourage you to contact them if you need additional information.

Citation guidelines

There are two kinds of documents on the website and the forms for citing them should be distinguished. If the document cited is a static document in a Case file, such as the AQ response for Yoruba  with a version number, then the citation is much like a book chapter citation and might look as follows:

Adesola, Oluseye. 2005. Yoruba Anaphora Questionnaire Response version 2.1. In Ken Safir, ed.,  Afranaph Website, at URL https://www.afranaphproject.afranaphdatabase.com/

I (Ken Safir) am the curator of all the data elicited without mention of someone else in that role, but it suffices to cite me as editor. When the static document reports a different elicitor, then the document should look something like

Mutaka, Philip Ngessimo. 2023. Nominal Structure data, elicited by Hazel Mitchley. In Ken Safir, ed., Afranaph Website, at URL https://www.afranaphproject.afranaphdatabase.com/.

Citations of the database should have a somewhat different form. If examples from a single language are reported (e.g., Yoruba), then the linguist who provided the examples is considered the author much in the way that the static AQ or CCQ response has an author. If you wish to make separate references to the different source documents that you draw examples from, then add references of this form accordingly. The emerging standards for citing electronic resources additionally advise that you should record the date that the information was retrieved, since such resources are likely to change over time and the database does not record version numbers (moreover, the database may be updated more frequently than the static questionnaire responses).

Adesola, Oluseye. 2008. Yoruba data. In K. Safir, ed., Afranaph Database, at URL https://www.afranaphproject.afranaphdatabase.com/. Retrieved December 7, 2008.

To cite the database as a whole (e.g., if you draw examples from many different languages), you could use something like the following:

Safir, Ken. 2008. Editor, Afranaph Database. At URL https://www.afranaphproject.afranaphdatabase.com/. Retrieved December 7, 2023.

If you have cause to refer to the results of some query you've carried out, you might wish to provide the expanded URL of the query results in the body of your text (or in a footnote); this will allow readers to reproduce the results page you viewed (but note that the database might be updated in the interim). The citation itself should still have one of the forms given above.

For more information on citing web resources, see the ISO 690-2 standard, this summary of the APA citation format, or this general guide at the University of Alberta Libraries. A web search will reveal many more resources.

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