With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Kenneth Safir will conduct one year of research on patterns of anaphora in African languages. "Anaphora" is the use of a linguistic term (e.g., a pronoun) to refer to an entity already mentioned or implicated in a discourse. Anaphora is interesting because it uses a limited number of terms and structures in the world's languages, and it is often the case that unrelated languages show exactly the same pattern. This research asks where the patterns come from. One possibility is historical connection among languages. Another is the way that language is used (e.g., people in different cultures want to talk about the same things and refer back to things they have mentioned). But certain subtle requirements on anaphora seem to depend on grammatical constructions and semantic interpretation that could only be uniform across languages if grammar has its origin in a deeper human property. Thus the study of anaphora explores a subtle realm of human cognitive functioning that is highly, structured, systematic, and hypothesized to be innate. An opportunity to study African anaphora patterns is to probe the expertise of the hundreds of African language specialists and native speakers who will attend the first joint meeting of the American Conference on African Linguistics and the World Congress of African Linguistics at Rutgers University in June, 2003. This project will enlist conference participants who are native speakers of the non-colonial languages of Africa in a questionnaire study of the patterns of anaphora in their languages. After the conference, the most productive consultants will collaborate with the research team in building a database including analytic essays on a website.
Theoretical work inspired by the distribution of anaphora in natural language has been a major engine for innovation in linguistics for over 30 years, but very few African languages have received the detailed study that has been focused on languages like Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Germanic, Slavic or Romance. Many of the most theoretically interesting aspects of anaphora, which depend on subtle structural and interpretive distinctions, have only been uncovered by state of the art research. This new expertise has not yet been applied in detail to the anaphora of any African language. The understudied patterns of African languages may hold important keys to our understanding of anaphoric phenomena generally and may serve to open up many poorly studied African languages for wider grammatical comparison.
