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.

Tajudeen Mamadou Yacoubou is a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. She is appointed as a research assistant for Fall 2020-Spring 2021. He will oversee the data entry policing, the day to day administration of the website, as well as being the co-consultant on the Baatonum case file. His research interests include interactions between tone and intonation in African languages. Deen2

For more information about Tajudeen Mamadou Yacoubou, see his website.

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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.