AFRANAPH PROJECT - Key Persons
Alexis Dimitriadis obtained his M.A. degree in Mathematics from Portland State University, and the Ph.D. degree in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently a senior research associate at the Utrecht institute of Linguistics OTS. He has participated in several technology-related projects, including the Berlin-Utrecht Reciprocals Survey, for which the software behind the Afranaph database was developed, and the Typological Database System. His primary research interests include the semantics and typology of reciprocals, anaphoric and pronominal reference, Greek linguistics, and Bantu linguistics.
Atsushi Oho - Fall 2013 - was a graduate student in the department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. He was in charge of data entry management, the management of several cases and is overseeing new and current features for the website. His research interests include theoretical and experimental approaches to syntax, semantics, pragmatics and their interfaces.
Augustina Owusu - 2017-2019 - was a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. She is appointed as a research assistant for Fall 2017-Spring 2018 and Fall 2018-Spring 2019. She will oversee the data entry policing, as well as the day to day administration of the website. Her research interests include tense and aspect in Akan syntax. For more information on Augustina Owusu, see her website.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University
Claire Halpert is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she has worked since receiving her Ph.D. from MIT in 2012. Her research has focused on topics including case, agreement, A-movement, counterfactuality, and clausal complementation. Professor Halpert has explored these topics primarily through the lens of her site-based research on the Bantu language Zulu; she has been working with Zulu speakers in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, since 2006. Since 2011, her work has focused on the variety of Zulu spoken by speakers in Durban, South Africa. She was a Visiting Scholar at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2011, 2012, and 2015 and was an instructor at the African Linguistics School in 2011 and 2013.
Job Titles:
- Investigador
- Researcher of the Faculty of Art
David Alberto Seth Langa is a Mozambican lecture and researcher of the Faculty of Art and Social Sciences (FLCS) at Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM). He is Ph.D in Linguistics from 2012. Their areas of research include Theoretical Descriptive Linguistics of Bantu Languages (African languages), Sociolinguistics and Ethnography of communication. As lecture, at the level of graduate and post graduate programs, he teaches the following subjects: Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology and Syntax of bantu languages. David Langa has been a supervisor of 20 monographs and jury of the same number of monographs. At post graduate level, he was supervisor of 5 dissertations of masters and the jury of 10 and also two jury of 2 PhD Thesis. He has been involved in various team of researchers which results in national and international publications. He presented 20 papers and published around 20 articles and chapters of the book. He published 1 book and co-author of around 20 mini-dictionaries of Mozambican languages, namely: Changana, Chuwabo, Copi, Lomwe, Makhuwa, Makonde, Mwani, Ndau, Nyanja, Nyungwe, Rhonga, Sena, Tewe, Tonga, Tshwa and Yaawo. He also published 2 school books of grade 2 Maths for bilingual education.
Derib Ado Jekale is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at Addis Ababa University (AAU). His Ph.D. dissertation (2011) is titled 'An Acoustic Analysis of Amharic vowels, plosives, and ejectives'. His MA thesis, also from AAU (2004) was 'The structure of Noun Phrase in Yem (an Omotic language spoken in southwest Ethiopia)'. His interests include experimental phonetics and phonology.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Linguistics at the Delta State University
Dr. Rose Aziza is a Professor of Linguistics at the Delta State University, Abraka, Nigeria. Her area of specialization is Phonology. She has worked extensively on various aspects of Nigerian languages, especially her native language, Urhobo, a relatively little known language of southern Nigeria with over two million native speakers. Rose has described the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Urhobo. Since 1990, she has pioneered the study of Urhobo as an academic discipline in the two tertiary institutions in the Urhobo area of Delta State, namely, College of Education, Warri, which produces middle-level manpower for the primary and secondary school levels, and Delta State University where it is an undergraduate degree option. She is a member of a number of national and international professional/ learned societies and has published widely both locally and internationally.
Job Titles:
- Student at Rutgers University
Ferdinand Duru is currently pursuing his PhD in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University in the United States. He earned his master's degree in Linguistics from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria, and his bachelor's degree in Linguistics and Igbo from the University of Benin, Nigeria. Prior to his doctoral studies, Ferdinand taught for eight years in the Department of Linguistics Studies at the University of Benin. His research interests include Morphology and Syntax, Syntax, and Semantics interface, and language documentation. He is a native speaker of the Igbo language.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University
Harold Torrence is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California Los Angeles. His research has centered on wh-questions, relativization, focus, and complementation. He has conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Ghana, and Nigeria, in addition to ex-situ fieldwork in the USA. Torrence has worked on Atlantic languages such as Wolof and Bassari, Kwa langauges of the Ghana-Togo Mountain group and Central Tano, Lower Cross languages including Ibibio and Otomanguean and Mayan languages of Mesoamerica.
Hazel Mitchley - 2019-2020 - wa s a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. She was appointed as a research assistant for Fall 2019-Spring 2020. She will oversee the data entry policing, as well as the day to day administration of the website. Her research interests include argument structure and the verbal spine. For more information about Hazel Mitchley, see her website
Job Titles:
- Student at Rutgers University
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Senior Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
- University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics
Jenneke van der Wal is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, and project leader of the NWO Vidi project 'Bantu Syntax and Information Structure .' After obtaining her Ph.D. degree at the same institute in 2009, she worked on grammaticalisation at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium), was part of the ERC project ‘Rethinking Comparative Syntax‘ at the University of Cambridge, and taught at Harvard University. Her research combines finding new data on Bantu languages with developing theories on the interface between syntax and information structure.
Jeremy Perkins - 2010-2011 - Jeremy is an associate professor at the department of linguistics at the University of Aizu. He was in charge of data entry management from 2010-2011 and took over the management of several cases and new and current features for the website. His research interests include phonology and phonetics, and in particular, consonant-tone interaction.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at UCLA
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Lecturer in the Department
- Senior Lecturer in the Department
Justine Mukhwana Sikuku is a Senior Lecturer in the department of linguistics and Foreign Languages at Moi University, Kenya. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Nairobi in 2011. Between August and November 2011, he was a post-doctoral associate in the department of linguistics at Rutgers University. His research interests are in syntax and morphology, particularly in the nature of syntactic anaphora of African languages, as evidenced by his dissertation on the nature of anaphoric relations in Lubukusu. He is also the native speaker consultant on Lubukusu for the Afranaph project, and the Afranaph Sister Projects.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Project Director
- Professor
Ken Safir is a professor in the department of linguistics at Rutgers University, a department he helped to found in 1989, seven years after receiving his Ph.D. from MIT. He is a linguistic theorist and syntactician with interests in the syntax-semantics interface and the nature of linguistic of anaphora in particular. He has also served as editor of the Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, of which he was also one of the founding editors. He has studied definiteness effects, the null subject parameter, crossover effects, small clauses, parasitic gaps, the structure of nominals and relative clauses and many other phenomena, but for the last 15 years much of his work has been devoted to the locality and interpretation of anaphoric relations and the connection between these relations and the morphology of anaphors, as evidenced by many of his recent publications, including The Syntax of Anaphora, published in 2004 by Oxford University Press, and The Syntax of (In)Dependence, published by MIT Press, also in 2004. In addition to new work on transitivity and reflexivity informed by his work for the Afranaph project, he is also working from a minimalist perspective on some fundamental architectural properties of the theory of syntax.
Kunio Kinjo - 2016-2017- is a graduate student in the department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. He was in charge of data entry management, the management of several cases and is overseeing new and current features for the website. His research interests the morpho)syntax of Japanese and the semantics of contrastive topic. For more information, see his website.
Lengson Ngwasi is an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He is currently pursuing a PhD in linguistics at Gothenburg University, Sweden. He is interested in the morphosyntax of Tanzanian Bantu languages, specifically on the Multiple Functions of Reflexive Prefixes, the topic of his PhD project. Before his PhD project, he worked on Reflexive Marking in Kihehe for his Master's degree in 2016. He is a native speaker of Kihehe, and Kihehe language consultant for the Afranaph project.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University
Mark Baker is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1985 from MIT. He taught at McGill University in Montreal for 12 years before moving to Rutgers in 1998. He specializes in the syntax and morphology of less-studied languages, particularly those of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. He seeks to bring together generative-style theories, data collected from fieldwork on diverse languages, and typological comparison in a way that illuminates all three-an approach sometimes called Formal Generative Typology. One of his mottos is "Languages are all the same - but not boringly so." Another is "The more languages differ, the more they are the same." He has written five research monographs, numerous journal articles, and one book for a popular audience (The Atoms of Language, 2001). He is also interested in studying the human mind, including the possibility of nonbiological, dualistic approaches.
Matthew Barros - 2011-2012 - was a graduate student in the department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. He was in charge of data entry management from 2011 - 2012. He had taken over the management of several cases and oversaw new and current features for the website. His research interests include syntax and the syntax-semantics interface. For more information, please see his website.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Associate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College
Michael Die rcks is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 2010. His main research interests include syntactic and morphological theory and the syntax and morphosyntax of languages of East Africa, mainly on the Luyia subgroup of Bantu languages. He has worked on the empirical domains of inversionconstructions, object marking, complementizer agreement, and hyper-raising constructions, addressing theoretical questions about agreement, noun phrase licensing, and locality in syntax. His research has been published in venues like Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Lingua, Linguistic Inquiry, and Studies in African Linguistics.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive
Michael Diercks is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College. He received his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 2010. His main research interests include syntactic and morphological theory and the syntax and morphosyntax of languages of East Africa, mainly on the Luyia subgroup of Bantu languages. He has worked on the empirical domains of inversion constructions, object marking, complementizer agreement, and hyper-raising constructions, addressing theoretical questions about agreement, noun phrase licensing, and locality in syntax. His research has been published in venues like Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Lingua, Linguistic Inquiry, and Studies in African Linguistics.
Michael O'Keefe - 2007-2008 - Michael was a graduate student in the department of linguistics at Rutgers University. He made important contributions to the transition between the old and new websites, developed our glossing standards and procedures for database entry, and managed several cases, particularly Ibibio. His primary research interests have been in phonology, specifically tone, stress, and learnability, and in syntax, specifically reciprocals and anaphora. For more information, please visit his website.
Naga Selvanathan - 2012-2013 - was a graduate student in the department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. He was in charge of data entry management, the management of several cases and is overseeing new and current features for the website. His research interests include syntax and the syntax-semantics interface.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Professor of Linguistics at the University of Yaounde 1
Ngessimo Mathe Mutaka is a full professor of linguistics at the University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon. He graduated at the University of Southern California Los Angeles, in 1990. His Ph.D. thesis entitled the Lexical tonology of Kinande (223p) has been published by Lincom Europa. He is the author of the Kinande-English Dictionary/ Dictionnaire Kinande-Français with late Kambale Kavutirwaki. The English version of this dictionary that comprises useful grammatical notes on Kinande is published on the Afranaph website. The French version will soon be available on the website of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium). His publications include An Introduction to African linguistics (317p), Research mate in African linguistics: focus on Cameroon. A fieldworker's tool for deciphering the stories Cameroonian languages have to tell (360p), Building capacity: using TEFL and African languages as development-oriented literacy tools (193p), more than forty papers of linguistics published in recognized journals, and two books on AIDS prevention in both English and French.
Oluseye Adesola - 2004-2005 - Oluseye remains an active member of the project as associate director (as above)
Oluseye Adesola received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2005 and is an assistant professor at the Yale University. He designed the original website for the Afranaph projects and continues to provide oversight, outreach and support for Afranaph, and is also our consultant for Yoruba. His research interests include Yoruba Studies, Comparative Syntax, African Culture and Literature, African Linguistics, Syntactic Theory, Anaphora, Wh-movement Constructions and Focus Constructions.
Current Research Assistant
Sreekar Raghotham is a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. He is the Research Assistant for Fall 2022 and Spring 2023. He will oversee the data entry policing and the day to day administration of the website. His research interests include the morphology, syntax, and semantics of natural languages, with current research revolving around the nature of verbal reflexivity and reciprocity in some African and South Asian languages.
Oumarou Boukari studied general linguistics with a focus on African linguistics at the University of Abidjan-Cocody (Ivory Coast) from 1996-1999. He wrote his masters degree between the universities of Bayreuth (Germany) and Abidjan-Cocody on tone in a Kwa language entitled ‘Système tonal de l'Abouré parler de Bonoua'. From 2001 to 2002, he wrote his DEA (Diplôme d'Étude Approfondie) on the nominal system of the same language: ‘Système nominal de l'Abouré parler de Bonoua' (also between Bayreuth (one semester) and Abidjan (one semester)). In 2002 he began a first Ph.D. project on Pré entitled ‘Description systématique du prépissia'. After more than two years of fieldwork, he was obliged to change the subject and to start a new Ph. D. project at the University of Bayreuth. The new project was on discourse markers in Songhay, with focus on Songhay-Zarma. In May, 2008, he successfully defended his Ph.D (Suma cum laude) entitled Articulation du discours dans le Songhay: pour une approche syntaxique et sémantico-pragmatique du songhay á partir de quelques connecteurs du songhay-zarma.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Associate Professor of Linguistics at CSUF
Patricia Schneider-Zioga is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at CSUF. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Southern California. Her dissertation examined the syntax of clitic-doubling in Modern Greek. She continues to be fascinated by the syntax of agreeing constructions such as pronominal clitics and subject/verb agreement. Her Erdös number is 5. This number measures how distant she is in co-authorship from the prolific and collaborative mathematician Paul Erdös. The fact that linguists can have an Erdös number demonstrates that at least some linguists have cooperated with mathematicians in order to solve problems in the field of linguistics (or vice versa).
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of African
Pius Tamanji is an associate professor of African languages and linguistics in the University of Yaounde I, Cameroon. He obtained his PhD in generative syntax from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in September 1999. His most recent book - A Descriptive Grammar of Bafut - was published early this year. He is co-author of An Introduction to African Linguistics and editor of three volumes of the proceedings of The North East Linguistics Society (NELS). His research interests include (1) the structure of Bantu languages, (2) Polylectal descriptions of African languages, (3) Speech defects and therapy. He is currently the chairperson of the WOCAL7 organizing committee, Vice president of the Fulbright Alumni Association-Cameroon, Vice president of the Humboldt Alumni Association-Cameroon and member of the Linguistic Association of Cameroon.
Rose Letsholo is the case file consultant for this language. More information and photograph to follow shortly.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
- Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University
Ruth Kramer is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her research concerns syntax, morphology, and the relationship between them, including topics like gender, number, syncretisms, clitic doubling, and agreement. She conducts research almost entirely on languages from the Afroasiatic language family, with a special focus on Amharic (Ethiosemitic). She published a monograph The Morphosyntax of Gender in 2015 with Oxford University Press, and her publications have appeared in such journals as Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Linguistic Inquiry, Syntax, Language and Linguistics Compass, and The Journal of Afroasiatic Languages. She received her Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she has been Associate Director of Afroasiatic Languages at Afranaph since 2012.
Ruth Kramer received her Ph.D. in Linguistics From the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2009 and is an associate professor at the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University, as well as an Adjunct Researcher at the Center for the Advanced Study of Language, University of Maryland. Her research interests are in theoretical syntax and morphology, particularly agreement, definite marking, and number and gender within nominal phrases.
Tamam Ahmed Youssouf is a graduate student of linguistics at the University of Toronto, Canada. He worked extensively on Oromo orthography and standardization of the language. He wrote his Major Research Paper for his Master's degree on "Issues in the Oromo Orthography" at York University also in Toronto Canada. His main interest is standardization of the Oromo language that has estimated speakers of over 30 million in Ethiopia alone. He has written a handbook of basic Oromo literacy in 1993, a guide on standardization of the Oromo language in 2008, an Oromo-Oromo dictionary with English equivalent, with Mr. Taha Abdi, in 2013 and is currently working on electronic bilingual dictionary. He has written articles on issues of the orthography, gender, copula and other topics of the Oromo language. He is a coordinator of the Caucus to Study and Preserve the Oromo language.
Vandana Bajaj - Spring 2014 - was a graduate student in the department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. She took over in Spring 2014 and was in charge of data entry management, the management of several cases and the management of new and current features for the website. Her research interests include focus, the semantics-pragmatics interface, and experimental methods.
Job Titles:
- Professor and Chair of Linguistics at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Vicki Carstens is Professor and Chair of Linguistics at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her research area is generativist syntax, with a focus on African languages. Much of her work explores the theoretical implications of agreement and word order phenomena within the framework of Noam Chomsky's Minimalist framework. Her articles have appeared in the journals Linguistic Inquiry, Syntax, The Linguistic Review, and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. (See published works.)
Ümit Atlamaz - 2015 - 2016 - was a graduate student in the department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. He was in charge of data entry management, the management of several cases and current features for the website. His research interests include agreement, case and focused questions. For more information, see his website.