News and Events
The Afranaph Project Development Workshop III
The Afranaph Project Development Workshop III will be held on December 13-14, 2019 at Georgetown University, Washington D.C.
The Third Afranaph Project Development Workshop is supported by a grant from the National Science foundation, BCS-1844235 and the Afranaph Project as a whole is supported by NSF BCS-1829122.
About the Workshop
The Afranaph Project, which was founded in 2003 and was originally designed to explore empirical patterns of anaphoric phenomena in the languages of Africa, has expanded its empirical scope in the past two years to by launching five Afranaph Sister Projects, which are explorations into other domains of grammar in the languages of Africa. The purpose of this workshop is to encourage the development of new research that exploits and/or expands 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 Sister Projects or on languages that Afranaph has elicited data for. The talks will report on the work of existing Sister Projects, will propose new Sister Projects, or will address research questions that arise in the investigation of languages currently in our case files (or that soon will be).
Although funding has been secured for 2018-2021, we will also have a business meeting to discuss a framework for funding of the project over the long term and to consider how the project can be developed over the next several years to better serve the research community. 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)..Besides those participating in the project and speaking at the workshop, the general; public is welcome to attend. There is no conference registration fee.
If you require English-ASL interpreting services or any kind of accommodations, please email Christiana McGrady at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. The deadline for requesting ASL interpretation is Friday, December 6th. A good faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests.
Afranaph Project receives new 3 year grant
The NSF has awarded Ken Safir, as Principal Investigator, a three-year grant for his proposal entitled “Exploring boundary conditions on the theory of agreement through the comparative study of African languages”. The new grant begins September 1, 2018. See the Project Summary and the Project Description for NSF BCS-1829122 for details. The Project description includes a partial listing of the achievements of Afranaph over the last 15 years.
The Afranaph Project Development Workshop II
The Afranaph Project Development Workshop II will be held on December 12-14, 2013 at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick.
The Second Afranaph Project Development Workshop is supported by a grant from the National Science foundation, BCS-1256137 and the Afranaph Project as a whole is supported by NSF BCS-1324404.
About the Workshop
The Afranaph Project, which was founded in 2003 and was originally designed to explore empirical patterns of anaphoric phenomena in the languages of Africa, has expanded its empirical scope in the past two years to by launching five Afranaph Sister Projects, which are explorations into other domains of grammar in the languages of Africa. The purpose of this workshop is to encourage the development of new research that exploits and/or expands 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 Sister Projects or on languages that Afranaph has elicited data for. The talks will report on the work of existing Sister Projects, will propose new Sister Projects, or will address research questions that arise in the investigation of languages currently in our case files (or that soon will be).
Although new funding has been secured for the next three years, we will also have a business meeting to discuss a framework for funding of the project over the long term and to consider how the project can be developed over the next several years to better serve the research community.
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)..Besides those participating in the project and speaking at the workshop, the general; public is welcome to attend. There is no conference registration fee, although participants are asked to register for our records.
Conference Program now available
Rutgers University, December 12-14, 2013 – Tentative schedule
Click on any title in the schedule below to see an extended abstract for the talk.
All abstracts (alphabetical by first author) can also be downloaded here.
Thursday, December 12
Reception at Department of Linguistics, 5:00-6:30
Friday, December 13
9:20 Welcome - Dean of Humanities, Rutgers University
9:30 Ken Safir, Rutgers University - The Afranaph Project: Where we are and where we might go
9:45 Vicki Carstens, University of Missouri - On DP positions and the location of subjects: Report on two Sister Projects
10:25 Coffee break
10:40 Sylvester Ron Simango - Rhodes University - Pastness, 'Persistence' and Tense/Aspect in African Languages: Report on the Tense and Aspect Project
11:20 Ibirahim Njoya, University of Hamburg/Asien-Afrika-Institut - Interaction between tense-mood-aspect and negation in Makaa (A83)
11:55 Tarald Taraldsen, University of Tromsø and David Langa, Universidade Edoardo Mondlane - Conjunctive and disjunctive verb forms
12:30-2:00 Lunch
2:00 Justine Sikuku - Moi University - Possessive Constructions in African Languages
2:35 Claire Halpert - University of Minnesota - Nominal morphology and licensing in Zulu and beyond
3:10 Break
3:25 Ken Safir and Mark Baker, Rutgers University - Towards a principled approach to clausal complementation and selection
4:05 Patricia Cabredo Hofherr - CNRS/Paris-8 & Surrey Morphology Group - Antecedentless subjects: Impersonal constructions and passives
4:40 Hilda Koopman, UCLA - Pooling resources: linking Afranaph and SSWL/Terraling and developing a semi automated questionnaire
5:25 End of day
Note: Blasius Achiri, University of Buea - The definite article and its range of definiteness in Moghambo - Dr Achiri is unable to attend but was able to deliver this paper.
Saturday, December 14
9:30 Ken Safir and Naga Selvanathan, Rutgers University - The Anaphora Sister Project: Transitive reciprocal constructions
10:10 Pius Akumbu, University of Buea - Competing Babanki anaphors
10:45 Break
11:05 Patricia Schneider-Zioga, California State University, Fullerton, and Ngessimo Mutaka, University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon - Linkers in Kinande
11:40 Mark Baker, Rutgers University and Ruth Kramer, Georgetown University - The morphosyntax of applicative markers in Amharic
12:15 Mamadou Bassene and Ken Safir, Rutgers University - Verb stems in Eegimaa: The syntax of the verbal spine
12:50-2:15 Lunch
2:15 Hermann Keupdjio, Universit of British Columbia - Wh-movement, remnant movement and clause typing in Mə́dûmbà
3:25 Break
3:40 Mamadou Bassene, Rutgers University – Mixed categories in Jóola Eegimaa derived nominals
4:15 David Langa, Universidade Edoardo Mondlane, and Tarald Taraldsen, University of Tromsø - Secondary nominal prefixes in Bantu
4:50 - End of day
7:00 Conference Dinner
New NSF Support for Afranaph
The US National Science Foundation has awarded the Afranaph Project another grant totaling $450,000 for the next three years to develop our resources and expand our sister projects. The new grant will support a graduate student research assistant in each of the next three years and a half year post-doc in year 2, which will be fall or spring of academic year 2014-2015. More information about the postdoctoral fellowship will be forthcoming in spring of 2014. The new money will also fund improvements to our database as well as support for our native speaker linguist consultants and those who enter and analyze the data here at Rutgers and elsewhere.
This money is independent from the grant we received for the Afranaph Project Development Workshop to take place this December. Last year at this time our grant was turned down and the project was in jeopardy, but we have stuck with it, and you have stuck with us, and together we have turned the tide. We at Rutgers would like to thank all of you whose participation in our project have made this possible. We look forward to working with all of you to justify the faith that NSF has placed in our common project.
