News and Events
Afranaph Project Development Workshop 2 Call For Papers
Please note that we are looking for any of the following three types of submissions:
A) Proposals for new research topics (NRT) to be developed in collaboration with Afranaph. See the guidelines and opportunities for NRT proposals in the provided link.
B) Papers on any linguistic topic that in some way exploits our existing Afranaph resources.
C) Papers that explore topics that include the analysis of languages that are currently explored in posted Afranaph resources.
The workshop is scheduled for Dec 13-15, 2013.
Important dates:
Deadline for Abstracts/ Proposals: May 24th 2013
Notice of Acceptance: June 15 2013
Workshop Dates: Dec 13 - Dec 15 2013
We look forward to receiving your abstracts/ proposals and seeing you at the workshop.
Please email safir (at) ruccs (dot) rutgers (dot) edu if you should need more information.
Afranaph Sister Projects
Beginning in 2012 and ever since, several new research initiatives based on the Afranaph infrastructure, methodology, consultant network and open access database have been developed as central to our current practice.
Each Afranaph sister project addresses a particular theoretical problem or set of issues, defines an empirical realm that bears on those issues and that can be profitably studied by exploring African languages (generally, or specific subfamilies, such as Bantu). Each Afranaph sister project (ASP) is organized by a researcher or a group of researchers who share an interest in a specific set of issues. The ASPs contribute to the Afranaph Project by adding their sentence elicitation data to the Afranaph database, creating an ever expanding searchable resource for those interested in broader investigations and comparisons for languages in the Afranaph family of projects.
Each ASP has the opportunity to ask to contact current Afranaph consultants for new elicitations, in the form of a questionnaire designed by the ASP, exploring the empirical realms of interest to the ASP in question. Initial funding to support native speaker linguistic consultants for their questionnaire responses will be borne by Afranaph. Sentence data collected by ASPs will be entered into the general Afranaph database, fully tagged for certain general search parameters, along with the usual full gloss, morpheme breakdown and translation. Some ASPs will have their own search page portal for the common database is designed to have the search parameters relevant to that particular ASP, i.e., the initial search page for the Afranaph Project proper will be different from the initial search page of a particular ASP. For example, there are search parameters not on the Anaphora Portal that are found on the Clausal Complementation Portal and vice versa, reflecting tagging more specific to one ASP as opposed to another. Decision about how the portal is designed, as well as how the questionnaire is designed, are made by the ASP researchers in consultation with the PI. Each ASP has its own webpage on our site. It is our hope that ASPs will find independent funding that will also support Afranaph infrastructure, though this is not required.
Links to the webpages for the ASPs we currently support are listed below. However, only the first two are currently active. Another research project, based on the argument structure of nominals, is in development.
• The African Anaphora Project
• The Clausal Complementation and Selection Project
• Situating the Subject in Bantu
• DP Positions in African Languages
• The Morphosyntax of Bantu Nouns
• Tense and Aspect in African Languages
Click here if you are interesting in developing your own Afranaph Sister Project, and click here if you would like to become a consultant for some or any of the ASPs.
The Afranaph Project Development Workshop
The Afranaph Project Development Workshop took place on December 10-11, 2010 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
The APDW was hosted by the Afranaph Project (NSF BCS-0919086), the Office of International Programs, the Center for African Studies, the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures, and the Linguistics Department of Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
About the Workshop
The Afranaph Project, which was originally designed to explore empirical patterns of anaphoric phenomena in the languages of Africa and to provide online access to data and analysis thereby uncovered, is expanding its empirical scope, using the infrastructure developed in the last six years, to initiate explorations in other domains of grammar in the languages of Africa and perhaps beyond. The purpose of this workshop is to encourage the development of research that exploits our data and our database, to consider proposals for new domains of research that suit our methodology and resources, and to bring together those who have worked on the project or the languages that are studied in it and to consider how the project can be developed over the next several years as a platform for research into new empirical domains. The goals and methodology of the Afranaph Project are fully explained and presented on our website.
Our workshop welcomes the participation of linguistic theorists, linguists specializing in comparative African linguistics, and native speaker language consultants already working with our project (with the understanding that these are usually overlapping categories). The workshop presentations are of essentially two kinds, those that consist of specific project proposals for new directions and those that present work on languages and/or data in the project wholly or partially. Besides those participating in the project and speaking at the workshop, the public is invited to attend. There is no conference registration fee, although participants are asked to register for our records.
Call for Papers
Official Announcement
Conference Schedule (Final)
Click on any title in the schedule below to see an extended abstract for the talk. For directions to a venue from the Hyatt Hotel, click on that venue.
Pre-Workshop Session from 3 PM - 4 PM, Thursday, December 9 in Room 108, Linguistics Building : This pre-workshop session is for those who would like to see how our database works as it is now, and how it can be extended to host sister projects. This informal presentation will show you how you can build an autonomous project within our database architecture. Please RSVP to Jeremy Perkins (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) if you wish to attend.
Reception on Thursday, December 9: For those participants who have arrived by Friday, there will be a reception at 6:30 at the Zimmerli Museum (on the corner of George Street and Hamilton Street in New Brunswick, a short walk from the train station and the Hyatt Hotel).
9:00 Coffee service and registration
9:20 Introduction: Ken Safir
9:30 Tense and Aspect in African Languages - Sylvester Ron Simango, Rhodes University, SA.
10:30 Break
10:45 The Forgotten Relative Clause of Ikalanga - Rose Letsholo, University of Botswana.
11:45 Clausal Complementation and Selection - Mark Baker and Ken Safir, Rutgers University.
12:25 Lunch (not included)
2:00 Agreement and Focus: an exploration of the limits of an Agree/Move typology (handout) - Patricia Schneider-Zioga, California State University, Fullerton.
3:00 The-ik-i- extensions and the tonal domains in the imperative and hortative in Kinande: a complement to the Kinande Grammar sketch (handout) - Ngessimo Mutaka, University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon.
3:40 END OF FRIDAY PROGRAM
Saturday, December 11 - Winants Hall
9:00 Coffee service and registration
9:30 DP Positions in African Languages (handout) - Vicki Carstens, University of Missouri, Michael Diercks, Pomona College, Loyiso Mletshe, University of the Western Cape, SA, Justine Sikuku, Moi University, Kenya
10:30 Break
10:45 The Morphosyntax of Bantu Nouns (handout) - Tarald Taraldsen, University of Tromsø.
11:45 Anaphoric Expressions in Konso - Ongaye Oda, Leiden University, The Netherlands/Dilla University, Ethiopia.
12:25 Lunch (not included)
2:00 An Examination of Anaphoric Relations in Selected African Languages (handout) - Justine Sikuku, Moi University, Kenya
3:00 African Body Part Reflexives (handout) - Eric Reuland and Dagmar Schadler, University of Utrecht.
3:40 Break
3:55 Properties of Subjects in Bantu Languages - Vicki Carstens, University of Missouri-Columbia, Michael Diercks, Pomona College, Luis Lopez, University of Illinois-Chicago, Loyiso Mletshe, University of the Western Cape, SA, Juvénal Ndayiragije, University of Toronto, Justine Sikuku, Moi University, Kenya
4:35 END OF SATURDAY PROGRAM
6:30 Banquet at Old Man Rafferty's (106 Albany Street, New Brunswick, NJ)
*Note: Old Man Rafferty's is very close to the Hyatt Hotel, so the linked directions are from Winants Hall.
Please contact Jeremy Perkins at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to register and for general information about the workshop.
