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.

In order to provide optimal access to the data we have elicited, the Afranaph Database was designed to permit online search and manipulation of the data stored in the extensive responses to our various questionnaires and the additional data elicited in follow-up inquiries. In those domains and for those languages for which we have complete data sets, the database permits fine-grained searches to aid in the analysis of both language-internal and crosslinguistic generalizations.

We are pleased to announce that the Kinande Dictionary Fund has achieved its goal! In December, 2011, 550 copies of the Kinande/Konzo-English Dictionary were shipped to Kampala, Uganda by the Africa World Press and eventually reached the hands of our distributors there. We would like to thank everyone involved for their assistance, including the Endangered Language Fund, which handled our donations.

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How to Use the Database

: Last Updated on Wednesday, 19 March 2014 09:42

In order to make our resources as broadly accessible and useful as possible, we have designed a database that makes it possible to search and manipulate our data in the service of language-internal or cross-linguistic analytic objectives. Besides simple searches for glosses or particular morphemes, search entities include language types, anaphoric marker types and sentence types and for many properties of all three sorts of entities. We have designed two search pages for the database, Simple Search and Enhanced Search. Simple Search can be mastered by total novices quite quickly on the basis of the brief description and tutorial below. Indeed, those who are of the sort to dive right in can probably figure out a lot of what they don’t know and come back to the tutorial if they are stumped. Enhanced Search is for those who have mastered Simple Search and are prepared to use the more specific custom features designed for isolating and combining the entity types for finer grained language-internal and crosslinguistic searches.

* For optimal viewing of the Afranaph Database, we recommend using Firefox as your browser. Please click here to download Firefox.

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Contact The Project:

Ken Safir, Director
Afranaph Project

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
18 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Phone: 732.932.7289
Fax: 732.932.1370
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.