Anaphora in the African Languages

Author : Ken Safir

Publication date : 2008

Original Questionnaire : node/50

Goals

"Our goal is to provide researchers with rich and accurate descriptions and informed analysis, a lofty goal that will not be easy to attain without talented contributors. In many cases, for those languages on which we choose to do follow up research, our consultants will become not only sophisticated informants, but collaborators in the research that we make available to the public at our web site. [...]

Part of our focus is to study any construction involving very local coreference, including bound coreference, between two arguments of a predicate. Each grammatical device the language can use to express such a relationship is called a "local coreference strategy", or "strategy" for short." (from the questionnaire's introduction)

Protocol summary

''The questionnaire begins with some general questions about the language and the source of the information. The second section of the questionnaire is designed to elicit an initial, very general, description and inventory of coreference strategies. Subsequent sections are intended to assist you in fleshing out some details and boundaries of the strategies, and parts of these sections may encourage you to develop some very specific information that may be of interest to linguistic research.'' (from the questionnaire's introduction)

Development context

"This questionnaire is loosely based on a questionnaire originally designed by Alexis Dimitriadis and Martin Everaert of Utrecht OTS (and adapted from theirs with their permission)." (from the questionnaire's introduction)

The questionnaire was used to develop the African Anaphora Database, which is part of the Afranaph project directed by Ken Safir.

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