The Afranaph Project: Anaphora in the African Languages

The work of the African Anaphora Project (AAP) was initially supported by NSF grant BCS 0303447, a small, one year exploratory grant (2003) that was renewed for 2004. This preliminary support, timed for the joint meeting of ACAL and WOCAL at Rutgers in 2003, enabled us to explore the potential that our method of elicitation and our website resources might hold for future research. Because our funds were limited, we restricted ourselves to the development of only five case files in order to hone our methods, our mode of operation and the presentation of data on our site. The future of the project, however, depended on further funds to extend our investigations to the widest possible range of languages and to improve the information technology that supports our site so that participation in our project and access to our results could be maximally facilitated. In March, 2005, we introduced a provisional website with five languages presented at various stages of preparation.

In the summer of 2005, NSF approved new, broader funding for our project and we set about expanding our research to additional languages (see Become a Consultant) and developing the site technology in order to include an interactive database that would permit our data to be explored in the most opportunistic ways. The development of the database turned out to be a difficult task, and in the meantime, few changes were made in the website as much went on behind the scenes, particularly with respect to research into languages that were not posted on the site. In the spring of 2006, two new case files were introduced (Ikalanga and Kinande), but many other files were being developed. After two fall starts, a general database design provided to us in March, 2008, by Alexis Dimitriadis of the University of Utrecht, finally met our requirements.

Accelerated activity began at that point, around March, 2008, as we worked to customize the database to our needs and as  we began entering data from languages that we had been working on for several years, but which had not yet been presented on the site. The first ten languages that have complete enough data sets have now been entered into the database and work of this kind is ongoing, both for several languages already represented in the database and for quite a number of others for which we do not yet have complete data from our anaphora questionnaire. As work on the new site and database reached a certain threshold, we were finally ready in November, 2008, to abandon the provisional site and open the new website you see now which links to the interactive database.

With continual support from NSF from 2003-2023, data collection has been steady and work has continued on an ever-expanding set of languages. We also continue to refine the database parameters and to expand the range of website features offered in our case files. The collection of detailed data sets and the process of follow-up investigations into each of the languages we explore takes many months for each language and more typically, it takes years of stop and start work. As a result, we anticipate that further changes to our site will be incremental, as research conditions allow.

In 2010 we had our first in-person event, Afranaph Project Development Workshop 1, which brought together Afranaph affiliated researchers and native speaker linguist consultants for the first time at Rutgers University and new research projects were subsequently launched. The new projects, Afranaph Sister Projects, involved a wider range of researchers or research teams which developed their own questionnaires to explore new empirical domains using Afranaph resources. Three years later, Afranaph Project Development Workshop II drew our expanding community together again and at that meeting, proposals for new research projects were entertained. By 2014, five new sister projects in addition to the Anaphora Project had been launched.

Our specialized interest in anaphora questions at the outset of the project provided us with a constant focus around which the infrastructure for broader fieldwork of this kind could be developed. Using that experience, we opened the project to the Sister Projects that developed after the first two workshops. Each sister project team designed their own questionnaire and we then appealed to our network of native speaker linguist consultants to provide questionnaire responses about their language. After responses came in and the data was curated, these new data were added to our database, such that each new contribution enhanced the database as a whole, allowing new searches to range over a wider set of data. Most of the new questionnaires were developed in the mid-teens and we gathered multiple responses for the sister project questionnaires. Some of our sister projects ceased to be active after a few years, but all the data from those projects is preserved and accessible in the database. We continue to gather data using the AQ, the CCQ, and the new OMQ designed by Michael Diercks.

The third Afranaph Development Workshop  that took place at Georgetown in December of 2019 presented research that had grown out of Afranaph activities, consolidated the Afranaph Project community connections, and brought new researchers to present work on the languages in the project and to propose new empirical domains that Afranaph resources could be used to explore. Unfortunately, the momentum that we all sensed at that event was soon to diminish when the pandemic refocused many of us on the needs of our home institutions.

The database and case files now include more than 40 languages with data collected from seven different questionnaires and the follow-up research based on those questionnaire responses. Since 2020, research into some languages has moved beyond the questionnaires, involving instead direct elicitations aimed at developing data that does not necessarily bear on the questions considered by the sister projects (for example, work on modality in Kinande and the argument structure of Bantu nominals). Just before the pandemic, Afranaph sponsored a visit for Prof. Philip Ngessimo Mutaka to work in person with a variety of linguists at Rutgers. Data developed from those interactions greatly expanded the range of Kinande data in our project. Those elicitations resulted in .pdf documents posted in the Kinande case file (or soon will be) and all of that data has been entered into the Afranaph database.

At this writing, spring of 2023, the Afranaph Project is coming to the end of its NSF sponsorship. That support paid for one graduate assistant per year for every year of the project. Starting in 2023-24, the Afranaph Project will continue to function with the PI in charge, but without any paid research assistants or paid consultants, or at least that is the expectation as of summer, 2023. In other words, future participation in Afranaph will primarily involve volunteer contributions of time, research and data. Nonetheless, we do expect there to be continued, but slower, expansion of our resources. Since the PI is now retired from Rutgers, there is no official institutional home or support for the Afranaph Project. It is possible that a new source of financial and/or institutional support will emerge, though nothing is in the works at this writing.

Both the website and the database are located on a commercial server independent of grant funds. As long as the server is running, the database and website will remain publicly accessible and limited expansion of our database will continue.