The Afranaph Project: Anaphora in the African Languages

Board of Directors expands

Four new members have joined the Board of Directors in the last two years. They are Mark Baker, Philip Ngessimo Mutaka, Patricia Schneider-Zioga and Harold Torrence. The Board will be charting the future of the Afranaph Project for the next several years.

Mark Baker is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University.  He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1985 from MIT.  He taught at McGill University in Montreal for 12 years before moving to Rutgers in 1998.  He specializes in the syntax and morphology of less-studied languages, particularly those of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. He seeks to bring together generative-style theories, data collected from fieldwork on diverse languages, and typological comparison in a way that illuminates all three–an approach sometimes called Formal Generative Typology.  One of his mottos is “Languages are all the same — but not boringly so.”  Another is “The more languages differ, the more they are the same.” He has written five research monographs, numerous journal articles, and one book for a popular audience (The Atoms of Language, 2001). He is also interested in studying the human mind, including the possibility of nonbiological, dualistic approaches. For more information about Mark Baker, please visit his website.

Ngessimo Mathe Mutaka is a full professor of linguistics at the University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon. He graduated at the University of Southern California Los Angeles, in 1990. His Ph.D. thesis entitled the Lexical tonology of Kinande (223p) has been published by Lincom Europa. He is the author of the Kinande-English Dictionary/ Dictionnaire Kinande-Français with late Kambale Kavutirwaki. The English version of this dictionary that comprises useful grammatical notes on Kinande is published on the Afranaph website. The French version will soon be available on the website of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium). His publications include An Introduction to African linguistics (317p), Research mate in African linguistics: focus on Cameroon. A fieldworker’s tool for deciphering the stories Cameroonian languages have to tell (360p), Building capacity: using TEFL and African languages as development-oriented literacy tools (193p), more than forty papers of linguistics published in recognized journals, and two books on AIDS prevention in both English and French.
For more information about Ngessimo Mathe Mutaka, please go tohis website.

Harold Torrence is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of California Los Angeles. His research has centered on wh-questions, relativization, focus, and complementation.  He has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria, in addition to ex-situ fieldwork in the USA.  Torrence has worked on Atlantic languages such as Wolof and Bassari, Kwa langauges  of the Ghana-Togo Mountain group and Central Tano, Lower Cross languages including Ibibio and Otomanguean and Mayan languages of Mesoamerica.
For more information about Harold Torrence, please go to his website.

Patricia Schneider-Zioga is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at CSUF. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. Her dissertation examined the syntax of clitic-doubling in Modern Greek. She continues to be fascinated by the syntax of agreeing constructions such as pronominal clitics and subject/verb agreement. Her Erdös number is 5. This number measures how distant she is in co-authorship from the prolific and collaborative mathematician Paul Erdös. The fact that linguists can have an Erdös number demonstrates that at least some linguists have cooperated with mathematicians in order to solve problems in the field of linguistics (or vice versa).

For more information about Patricia Schneider-Zioga, please visit her website.