African Anaphora Project

Patterns of anaphora are observed whenever one linguistic form refers back to, or depends on, another, the way a pronoun or reflexive refers back to its antecedent. For example, the English reflexive 'himself' refers back to 'John' in 'John hurt himself' and the reciprocal 'each other' partitions and pairs 'the men' in 'The men praised each other.' However, the world's languages differ markedly in the range of forms that are used to convey these meanings. For example, Guezenaya Tarifit (GT), a Berber language spoken in Morocco, has two very different reciprocal forms and only one reflexive; Yoruba, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Nigeria, has only one form for all reciprocal and reflexive interpretations, while another Niger-Congo language, Urhobo, has four forms that can be used either as reflexive or (if the antecedent is plural) reciprocal. Thus, although linguists have uncovered deep commonalities across the world's languages with respect to the distribution of anaphoric forms and anaphoric (dependency) relations, there are still cross-linguistic differences in the forms and structures that permit anaphora. The goal of this project is to expand our understanding of the empirical patterns of anaphora in the indigenous languages of Africa.

Linguists want to understand not only what is deep and general about the linguistic faculty of human beings, but also what the factors are that determine and permit the range of linguistic variation we observe. For example, the GT Berber reciprocals cannot always be used interchangeably for certain subtle semantic distinctions, and the difference is not only systematic in GT Berber, but similar systematic distinctions hold of other languages with more than one form that can be used for reciprocal interpretations. Why should such distinctions hold across distinct languages, languages that may not even have had an historical connection in the last several millennia? Answers to questions like these and to many other interesting theoretical questions about anaphoric phenomena depend on subtle structural and interpretive distinctions only uncovered by state-of-the-art cross-linguistic research. This new expertise has rarely been applied in detail to the anaphora of any African language. Rich and subtle data will be elicited by enlisting the help of native speaker linguists as language consultants, employing their skills as both linguists and native speakers, to fill out a detailed questionnaire made available over the internet. Both the questionnaire responses and related materials will be presented on the project web site in a manner that permits fine-grained comparative work. In this way the project will facilitate the growth of an international community of scholars devoted to typological questions while at the same time developing a methodology that can be a model for comparative research into other empirical patterns in the world's languages. The data will be presented on a web site with the absolute minimum of theory specific terminology to insure wide accessibility. Linguists working in a variety of theoretical frameworks will be able to exploit any new patterns that may emerge from the comprehensiveness and detail presented in our case files, catalyzing innovative advances in linguistic research. Eliciting rich and comparable data over a wide range of languages will improve the quality of evidence available to support or refute current and future theoretical proposals about the nature of anaphora and related phenomena.