PROJECT SUMMARY

      Nilotic languages are spoken in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and Congo.  The family contains some 29-to-53 languages, depending on complex issues concerned with degrees of mutual intelligibility and ethnic self-identity.  Numbers of speakers per language range from about 3.5 million (Dholuo) to 50 or fewer (e.g., Omotic); most languages are in-between, having a few hundred thousand speakers.  Significant changes are impacting many Nilotic groups, with implications for cultural and linguistic survival. For decades, a number of Nilotic languages and cultures have, experienced significant disruption due to war, famine, and movements to refugee camps in search of food, medical attention, and safety.  Other Nilotic groups have experienced significant and sustained contact with Western influences over the past century due to colonialism, mission activities, western-oriented educational systems, establishment of international cities in their tradiational areas, tourists, government land policies, etc.  Yet other small groups have been, and are being, absorbed into larger language groups.  In many cases these socio-political events have greatly hampered linguistic work, while at the same time precipitating tremendous culture change, if not in some cases disintegration.

                The Nilotic family divides into three main branches, known as “Western”, “Eastern”, and “Southern”, but is said to be one of the two most complex sub-families within the larger Nilo-Saharan phylum.  While some languages of the family have been reasonably well documented, others  have received essentially no documentation and attempts to further understand the family are hampered by lack of adequate data.  The current proposal requests support for a research coordination network (supplementary to an ongoing Maa lexicography and text project).  The network will hold a series of four workshops that convene currently active Nilotic linguists, and will address four general needs: (1) Enable Nilotic scholars to learn of each other’s work and, in so doing, increase the quality and quantity of research results beyond what individuals working in isolation have achieved.  (2) Begin to address standardization issues in the creation and further development of lexicographic and text data bases for Nilotic languages, and to initiate a pilot project coordinating two to three data bases.  (3) Undertake cross-family typological study of phenomena salient in the family, focusing on issues in word structure, syntax and lexical semantics.  Given the importance of vowel and tone phenomena to lexical and syntactic processes, sound structure (phonology) will also be involved.  (4) Based on participants’ research, develop a scientifically sound and educationally rich web site for the Nilotic language family, accessible to the general public, in which technical concepts will be adequately explained.  While historical work is not the focus of the workshops, solid groundwork will nevertheless be laid for further historical work, as participants address the feasibility of setting standards for coding linguistic features, as word lists and lexicography endeavors are brought to light, and as the construction of searchable data bases is addressed.

                To date the number of Nilotic scholars is relatively small, and researchers are widely scattered around the world and are working in relative isolation.  For some, productive research has been impeded by lack of resources and lack of an intellectual community.  The network will bring together researchers from all three branches of the Nilotic family, some who are long-standing students of the family, and others who are relatively new, including scholars from the USA, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, and Kenya.  Ongoing efforts will be made to include additional native-speaker linguists and advanced graduate students.  Synergy resulting from the research network will enhance the intellectual community for newer and relatively isolated Nilotic scholars, including, in some cases, linguistically-trained native speakers.

      The research network will increase the quantity and quality of work produced by individual scholars, and will lay the foundation for cross-family searchable databases.  It will have long-term impact on documentation of cultures and languages of East Africa, will help reduce expensive reduplication of efforts, and will highlight the intellectual and cultural achievements of these peoples for the rest of the world at a time when many of them are under severe stress and disruption to their historic ways of life.

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PROJECT DESCRIPTION

 

1. Results From Prior NSF Support
 

NSF support within the past five years consists of three grants: (1) Dissertation grant SBR-9634752, $10,100, Sept 1996-Dec 1997, with Alejandra Vidal, for “Pilaga Grammar and Texts”, resulting in Vidal (2001).(2) Conference grant SBR-9616482, $38,500, Feb 1997-Jan 1999,“International Conference on External Possession and Related Noun Incorporation Phenomena, Eugene, Oregon, Sept 7-10, 1997.”This resulted in publication of 20 scholarly papers (Payne & Barshi, eds., 1999), covering external possession in Australia, Asia, the Pacific, North America, Meso-America, South America, Europe, and Africa; (3) SBR-9809387, $244,000, Sept 1998 - present, “Maa (Maasai) Lexicography and Text Databases”, for which the current supplement is being requested.Research results of the current grant are listed below.
 

1.1 Summary of results to-date, and description of databases.Five distinct Maa databases are under development by the PI and research team.A Maa lexicography database, developed using Shoebox 5.0, now contains some 4,200 primary entries and hundreds of additional sub-entries.Each entry includes fields for the “head” synchronic root or stem in accurate phonological form; the root (for facilitating cross-language historical work); a phonologically accurate citation word form; a Swahili-based orthography form (which most literate native and non-native speakers of Maa would use, but which lacks tone and certain vowel contrasts); dialect variants specifying dialect; case and number forms for nouns and adjectives; sense definitions; illustrative examples demonstrating senses and morphosyntactic facts; semantic domain(s) of the head root/stem; encyclopedic information; etymological information; morpheme breakdown where the head stem form is not morphologically transparent; argument structure and lexical aspect type for verbs; sources of information (speakers, texts, written documents); and identification of data-entry personnel.

The core of the lexicography database is built around IlKeekonyokie (Central Kenyan) Maa, which closely matches data in Tucker & Mpaayei (1955).Additional Central Maa data come from IlPurko of Kajiado.Extensive data from one Samburu (North Maa) dialect have been collected and entered in the database.Less, but significant, data comes from Kisongo (South Tanzanian) Maa.A small amount of data represents IlWuasinkishu (Western Kenyan) Maa.Records include data from Vossen (1988), entered in distinct fields from data collected under the current grant, as it is sometimes difficult to know when form differences owe to variation in dialect versus transcription.

A text database now contains 61 texts of varying genres, lengths, and stages of analysis.Texts are from IlKeekonyokie, IlPurko of Kajiado, and Laikipia (North Maa) areas.All have been transcribed, checked for tone and tongue root quality, and divided into native speaker’s judgments of “sentence” units (often including more than one clause).So far about two-thirds have free English translations, provided by a linguistically-trained native speaker.About one-third have been parsed using Shoebox 5.0’s interlinearizing function.

An allomorph database has been developed to aid in text parsing.As the degree of Maa tone, tongue root, and other morphophonemic changes is extensive, the decision has been made to include only suppletive or highly irregular allomorphs in the lexicography database.At some point the allomorph database will be a significant resource for thorough phonological analysis of Maa.In addition, the PI has developed a verb database, containing information about inflectional and derivational possibilities, semantic argument structure, and selectional restrictions for some 260 verb roots.The PI and graduate students have developed a clause database of some 3,750 records, focusing on verb forms.This could also be termed a verb tone database, as it documents carefully checked tone (via whistling) for both complex and simple verb forms.Many records have been tagged for all morphemes contained in the principle verb, so complex searches can be performed to select various sets of data for tone (or other) analysis.

Educational web pages have been developed under the project, oriented to the general public and also useful for class assignments (http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~dlpayne/maasai/ madict.htm).These address basic aspects of linguistics including African language families, cultural and historical relevance of linguistic analysis, significant features of Maa phonology, word structure, syntax, semantics, and language contact.

1.2 Work in progress.In addition to ongoing database work, a field trip by the PI is planned to Kenya for 2001 to work with Kenyan collaborators.Plans are to (1) focus on Western IlWuasinkishu Maa and/or to further complete IlPurko and Samburu Maa, (2) ensure complete transcription and translation of the texts so that researchers can proceed with analytical text-based work, and (3) collect Samburu and Kisongo or IlWuasinkishu texts.Work is in progress, in collaboration with students, on Maa verb types, argument structure, and voice; parts of speech (nouns, relational nouns, adjectives, stative verbs, active verbs); color terms, human propensity concepts, and other semantic domains; the phonetics of tongue root advancement and retraction in Maa vowels; and tone.

1.3 Grant support has contributed to development of human resources via training two undergraduates in linguistic database work, one undergraduate in beginning acoustic analysis of vowel qualities and some field methods, and three graduate students in field methods (working with a native Maa speaker in Oregon, who has now left).A fourth graduate student received extensive field experience in Kenya and is now working on verb tone for an MA thesis.A fifth evaluated and added information to the lexicography database from already-published sources.Formal graduate linguistic course work has been provided for native speaker Leonard Kotikash, who has worked with the PI since 1994.This training has enabled Kotikash to work independently with monolingual speakers from new dialects.Informal but substantive linguistic training and practical job skills have been provided for two more Maa speakers (one man with a B.A., and one woman with secondary education), who have worked steadily in the past two years on tone and text transcription, development of illustrative lexicography examples, and sense documentation.

1.4 Publications and manuscripts supported to date by the current grant are Bush (1999), Kotikash (2000), Payne (1998, 2001), Rasmussen & Payne (submitted), Schneider (1998).Together, these address issues in acoustic phonetics, tone, morphology, syntax, and semantics.

 

2. Objectives of the Supplement

 

The current proposal seeks support to develop a network of Nilotic research scholars via a series of four structured linguistic workshops (described in section 4), spread across two years.The network will provide a supportive and stimulating community for Nilotic researchers with the general goals of enhancing quantity and quality of individual research projects and collaborative cross-family work.The workshops have the following over-arching objectives (in addition to serving as a venue for reporting results of the PI’s Maa work to other Nilotic experts).Other steering committee members (section 5) have enthusiastically offered to seek Canadian and German funding for participants from those countries, so there is high liklihood of achieving the following objectives on an international scale:

1. Establish ongoing relationships among researchers, both within and across branches of the family, such that collaboration will extend beyond the life of the initiating workshops.

2. Communicate what has been done and what is in-process on lexicography and lexical semantics, phonology, and morphosyntax of Nilotic languages.

3. Stimulate in-depth work on individual languages, with focus on features of particular salience in the family (see workshop details below). Though theoretical concerns properly emerge, given that documentation of many Nilotic languages is still scanty, the primary objective here is to improve documentation and deepen descriptive and typological knowledge of patterns in Nilotic languages.

4. Increase awareness and understanding of what standardization may be advisable in Nilotic database development, in line with current “best practices”, so as to facilitate later development of cross-family (perhaps web-implemented) searchable databases for the Nilotic family.

5. Initiate a pilot project coordinating two to three lexicographic databases which are already well-advanced; communicate what is learned about the process and pitfalls to other members of the network.

6. Develop a scientifically sound, educationally rich web site for the Nilotic language family, accessible to the general public.

 

3.Significance and Current State of Research on Nilotic Languages
 

The Nilotic language family extends through Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, and into Ethiopia and Congo. There are some 29 to 53 languages, depending on complex issues surrounding degrees of mutual intelligibility and ethnic self-identity.Demographically, Nilotic is the dominant language family in the East African region after Bantu.Unity of the family was first recognized by Koehler (1955) and popularized by Greenberg (1971), and divides into three branches known as “Western”, “Eastern”, and “Southern” (terms apply to genetic groupings, rather than geography).Nilotic comprises one of the lower nodes within the complex Nilo-Saharan Family.However, it is one of the two most complex and least understood sub-families within the larger Nilo-Saharan phylum (Bender 1997).

Published materials reveal striking typological similarities among most Southern and Eastern Nilotic languages (verb-initial word order, case marking by tone in many languages, relatively agglutinative verb morphology, singulative markers, number agreement in the NP), as opposed to Western Nilotic (often SVO word order, relative absence of tonal case marking, more fusional word structure with very short verb words, no singulative markers) (cf. Bennett 1974, Tucker & Bryan 1966).However, to our knowledge, no explanation of how the typological similarities and differences have come about has ever been proposed.

Number of speakers per language ranges from about 3.5 million (Dholuo) to 50 or fewer (e.g., Omotic), with many languages having a few hundred thousand speakers.During past decades many Nilotic languages and cultures have experienced significant disruption due to war, drought and famine, and movements to refugee camps in search of food, medical attention, and safety.These sociopolitical events have greatly impeded linguistic work, and at the same time precipitate tremendous cultural change if not, in some cases, cultural disintegration.This is particularly true for the languages of southern Sudan.Other groups have experienced significant and sustained contact with Western influences via colonialism, mission activities, western-oriented educational systems, establishment of international cities in their traditional areas, tourists, and government land policies (e.g., Maasai traditional grazing lands extend across the Kenya-Tanzania border and encompass the international city of Nairobi).Other small groups are being absorbed into larger language groups (e.g., Omotic speakers are bilingual in Maa).

During the past century substantive work, including grammars and dictionaries, has been done on a few Nilotic languages.As a sampling, work on Western Nilotic Luo includes Tucker (1994), Omondi (1982), and Okoth-Okombo (1982, 1997); work on Anywa includes Reh (1996, 1999a).For Eastern Nilotic, work on Maa includes Tucker & Mpaayei (1955), Levergood (1987), K?nig (1993), Mol (1996), Kotikash (2000), Payne (1997a, 1997b), Payne et al. (1994), and others.For Southern Nilotic, research on Nandi includes Creider & Creider (1989) and an in-process dictionary.Other languages have received solid work on specific topics, e.g., Gilley (1992) on Shilluk phonology, Andersen (1999, among other articles) on Mabaan and Western Nilotic phonologies.Family-wide research includes that done by Lionel Bender with primary focus on higher-level Nilo-Saharan issues;Dimmendaal (1995, 2000); Creider (1981, 1989), and Creider & Rottland (1997) on Southern Nilotic; and Bernd Heine (often with colleagues, e.g., Heine & Claudi 1986). For parts of the family, comparative word lists have been collected and some reconstructions have been proposed (cf. Rottland 1982, Vossen 1983).

Table 1 lists recent and current Nilotic scholars and known databases and word lists in progress.Not all language names and researchers are included, though the table is reasonably complete in terms of currently-active scholars.It is salient that US-based researchers are few.When added to earlier work (e.g. Muratori 1938, 1948; Tucker & Mpaayei 1955), the activity indicated in Table 1 represents solid progress on the family.It remains the case, however, that Nilotic research is generally not well advanced: for some languages all that exist are word lists, and quite a number of languages have undergone no professional linguistic work.
 
 

Table 1. Selected languages of the Nilotic family, researchers and current location, and known lexicography materials (DICT = dictionary, db = database; first names and primary locations given on first mention only).
 

Branch/Language	Researchers	Lexicography Materials
WESTERN NILOTIC	Anne Storch, Frankfurt	word lists-Dinka, Nuer, northern Lwoo
Dinka (various dialects)	Torben Andersen, Denmark
Nuer, Atuot	Leoma Gilley, Sudan
Lwoo:
Northern Mabaan	Andersen
Belanda Bor, Shatt
Shilluk	Gilley
Anywa P?ri	Mechtilde Reh, Hamburg	DICTdb
Jur-Lwo	Storch	word list
Southern	Peter Avery, Toronto	comparative db
Kumam	Gerald Heusing, Leipzig
Alur	Heusing, Avery	list/db
Dhopadhola	Heusing
Acholi	Reh	Cross-dialect DICT
Lango(Uganda)	Michael Noonan, Wisconsin Avery	list/db
Dholuo	Jane Alowo, Uganda Okoth-Okombo, Kenya Daniel Owino, Kenya
	Suzanne Kemmer, Texas	database
	Avery	list/db
EASTERN NILOTIC Bari	G. Bureng Nyombe, Kenya Eluzai Yokwe, Kenya	DICT?
Teso-Turkana  Toposa	Helga Schroeder, Kenya	DICTdb
Turkana	Gerrit Dimmendaal, K?ln
Teso  Mening
Otuho-Maa  Lopit, Dongotono, Lango (of Sudan), Lokoya, Otuho		Otuho word list
Ongamo-Maa	Rainer Vossen, Frankfurt	word lists
North Maa-Camus	Bernd Heine, K?ln Christa K?nig, K?ln	plant terms
North Maa-Samburu	Leonard Kotikash, Kenya	DICT db
Central Maa	Doris Payne, Oregon Kent Rasmussen, Oregon Kotikash	DICT & text db
South Maa	Hilda Koopmans, Los Angeles	sentence db
	Kotikash/Rasmussen/Payne	DICTdb
SOUTHERN NILOTIC  Kalenjin
Nandi	Chet Creider, Canada Jane Tapsubei Creider, Canada	DICT DICT db
Saboat	Iver Larsen, Denmark/Kenya Patrick Mongosoi, Kenya	DICTdb
Endo	Joost Zwarts, Holland/Kenya	db
Pokot, Okiek
Datooga	Roland Kiessling, Hamburg

 
 

To date, Nilotic researchers have worked quite independently with comparatively little cross-family discussion and collaboration.This is due partly to geographic dispersion: as Table 1 indicates, researchers are scattered in the USA, Canada, Germany, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Denmark (and perhaps Australia).With the exception of an NSF-supported parasession to the 1995 Annual Conference on African Linguistics for support to African-based scholars (PIs M. Lionel Bender and Tom Hinnebusch), extremely few regular conferences have convened a significant number of Nilotic researchers. Though a Nilo-Saharan colloquium (including more than Nilotic) occurs every few years, travel costs prohibit some from regular involvement; and, as a general conference, coincidence of topic has been the exception rather than the rule.

 

4. Methodology
 

Objectives listed in Section 2 above will be achieved via a network website and four workshops, addressing database construction, lexicography, lexical semantics, morphosyntax, and phonology.They will not specifically focus on historical reconstruction, but will lay significant ground work for substantive additional historical work, including the evolution of grammatical patterns.

The four workshops will optimally be spread over two years. A shorter time frame will not enable participants to prepare fully for the workshops, given other responsibilities during the same time period.Timing of workshops is planned to avoid peak summer travel costs in the northern hemisphere.Geographic rotation of the workshops will enhance participation by scholars from different areas of the world.The 2001 Nilo-Saharan conference is already scheduled for Hamburg, Germany, so it is anticipated that the first workshop will be convened there subsequent to that conference.This will facilitate the participation by scholars interested in Nilo-Saharan overall.Also, a large concentration of researchers is based in Germany, and while meeting there increases costs requested under this proposal (as support is requested for both African and US participants), it reduces costs overall.Convening some workshops (e.g., the 2^nd and 4^th) in Nairobi, Kenya, is the surest way to increase participation by East-African based scholars and native-speaker linguists (including under-represented groups), as well as several Europeans who work long-term in East Africa.Finally, one workshop will be held at a venue in the US (e.g., the University of Oregon), which can contribute in-kind support for facilities and workshop supplies.

Prior to the first workshop, the steering committee will establish a network website listing objectives, activities, and contact information regarding the workshops.To increase access to Nilotic research, the website will contain links to pre-publication versions of papers in pdf or word-document format, and to preparatory materials for workshops.
 

Workshop 1. Introduction of research foci. Issues in Nilotic Lexicography and Text Databases. (3 days, Summer/Fall 2001 Hamburg, Germany).The first workshop will have five objectives:
 

(1) Research Overview. Network members will give an overview of their research histories and interests so as to adequately inform others of what has been done, and by whom, and to give all participants an understanding of the status of research across the family.This will facilitate learning about new and younger researchers to the field.An additional goal will be to evaluate what published dictionaries, lexicographic databases, and word lists exist, and in what formats.[Estimated time: two-thirds of a day]

(2) Identification of issues in Nilotic language structure which have implications for the format and technical aspects of Nilotic lexicography databases. Participants will identify specific issues in the structure of Nilotic languages that have bearing on design of effective and revealing databases for Nilotic languages, and which are of relevance to family-wide typological studies.Such issues will include, but are not limited to, use of tone for case marking; prefered noun and verb citation forms (related to case marking and part of speech); proliferation of singular/plural forms (sometimes the singular, sometimes the plural, is morphologically simplest); derivational vs. inflectional functions of noun genders; transitivity-related verb derivations; voice; nominalization and verbalization.Selected participants will prepare short papers addressing these issues, highlighting how and why they are of particular interest (or "problematic") in the Nilotic family, followed by discussion. [Time: one day]

(3) Comparative lexicography and text databases. Development of fully coordinated searchable databases is beyond the scope of the workshops, considering that most Nilotic databases are in progress, involving ongoing field work.However, given the goal of eventually developing coordinated searchable databases, the first workshop will include a linguistic database expert and/or representative(s) of one or more already established corpus and databank projects (e.g., the Max-Planck-Institute, Nijmegen; or the Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania).The purpose is three-fold: (1) to communicate well with linguistically-sophisticated corpora and database designers about the nature and challenges of Nilotic (and other African) languages, (2) to provide Nilotic researchers with expert input on consequences (good and bad) that specific font and database conventions are likely to have, particularly for languages where multiple features function autosegmentally with semantic and grammatical consequences, and (3) to facilitate eventual integration of Nilotic data with corpora or databanks elsewhere, thus enhancing access to these materials by scholars beyond the immediate Nilotic circle.

Participants will prepare handouts describing the technical specifications of databases under development (e.g., software, operating platform), orthography and symbol conventions (particularly for tone and tongue root contrasts), field-structure of records such as head entry form, root fields, historical and etymological information, dialect fields, examples, verb argument structure, semantic domains, derivational verb morphology, aspect forms, tone patterns, etc.For each software program, convention, etc., participants will be asked to self-evaluate what has been good/useful about decisions, and what has been lacking or awkward.

Based on this information, and with the help of a database expert, network members will discuss the feasibility of a pilot project coordinating two or three of the more advanced databases, and how such coordinated databases could continue to be updated with ongoing research.In the pilot project, databases will be kept separate rather than integrated into a single whole, and will contain metadata about language, sources of information (dialect region, speakers), compiler, and any conditions on use of the data (see section 6 below).Already, Creider, Kemmer, Reh, and Payne have indicated willingness to share electronic databases with the rest of the network, though not all the databases are yet ready for distribution (e.g., the PI’s Maa databases are replete with questions that need checking with native speakers).[Time: one day]

(4) Discussion of future workshops. The first workshop will conclude with a planning session for subsequent workshops.Current plans will be reviewed and suggestions will be solicited for improving content and format.Written input will be solicited from those who so prefer. [Time: one to two hours]

 

Workshop 2: Lexical Semantics (2 days, Spring 2002, Kenya).The second workshop will focus on semantic domains and lexical semantics of cultural and linguistic interest in the family. This workshop will be organized around presentation of work-papers followed by group discussion.The aim is to share work in progress and stimulate research.Domains considered may include pastoralist-culture terms, life-stage terms, plant/animal terminology, kinship and social relations, death vocabulary, disease, healing, medicine, human personality concepts and intersection with adjectives vs. stative verbs, movement verbs, cognition and speaking verbs, stative vs. active verbs, color and design terms, semantic motivations for sg. vs. pl noun form as basic, and domains of borrowing.These research reports will stimulate subsequent data collection and enhance information available for cultural and historical-linguistic study.The workshop will conclude with evaluation and discussion of future workshop plans.

 

Workshop 3. Phonology and Morphosyntax I (verb argument structure and simple clauses) (2 to 3 days, Eugene, Oregon).
 

(1) The third workshop will focus approximately one day on phonology issues of family-wide significance, particularly tongue root and vowel features, tone, and typologically unusual or problematic consonant problems.Selected network participants will prepare and pre-circulate papers on these issues for brief presentation, followed by group discussion [Time: one day]

(2) Though some issues of verb argument structure will have been introduced in Workshop 2, Workshop 3 will specifically focus on verb issues which have close interaction with simple clause structure.Topics are likely to include verb and valence types, middle/reflexive formations, antipassives, causatives, applicatives, directionals, i- prefix and Class I vs. Class II verbs, aspect, case marking.Selected participants will prepare and pre-circulate papers on these topics for brief presentation, followed by general group discussion [Time: one to two days]

(3) The workshop will conclude with evaluation and discussion of future plans [Time: one hour]
 
 
 

Workshop 4. Morphosyntax II (nouns, complex sentences); database follow-up discussion (2 days, Spring 2003; Nairobi, Kenya).
 
 

(1)The fourth workshop will first focus on issues in nominal morphosyntax and complex sentences. Topics are likely to include number marking and gender, NP-internal syntax, external possession, “serializing" constructions (of the Nilotic sort), complementation.[Time: one to one-and a half days]

(2)Ongoing database work is certain to be discussed across the life of the workshops via electronic or regular mail.However, the fourth workshop will specifically update network members about advances in individual database collections and the pilot project coordinated databases.Problems needing solution will be identified, with the aim of seeking further input from database experts.Readiness to begin implementation of web-based searchable databases, preferably in coordination with already existing corpora and databank projects (cf. workshop 1) will be discussed. [Time: one-half day]

(3)The workshop series will conclude with discussion of how to promote continued research sharing within or in addition to venues provided by established conferences, a plan for ongoing maintenance and development of the website, and evaluation of accomplishments.[Time: two hours]
 
 
 

5.Network Members
 

The Nilotic research network will consist of a steering committee, a core of committed participants, and open invitations to other researchers to participate as they desire and can.
 

5.1 Coordination mechanism.In addition to the PI (Doris Payne), Drs. Suzanne Kemmer, Chet Creider, and Mechthild Reh have agreed to serve as the steering committee.Brief biographical information follows:

Chet Creider (PhD Minnesota 1973) Professor of Anthropology, University of Western Ontario, Canada.Field research in Kenya 1970-87. Four books on Nilotic covering Kalenjin phonology, morphology, Nandi syntax, and Nilotic syntax, including Creider 1982, 1989, 1990, and multiple articles, and editing of Tucker’s (1994) extensive A Grammar of Kenya Luo (Dholuo).Work with Jane Tapsubei Creider on a Nandi dictionary is near completion.Synergistic contributions include two terms as Chair of the Department of Anthropology, obtaining and administering grants to set up and refurbish computer labs for teaching linguistics, and collaborative work on morphology with linguists and computer scientists.

Suzanne Kemmer (PhD Stanford 1988) Assoc. Professor of Linguistics, Rice Univ. Luo field methods 1997-98.Papers on Luo include Kemmer (2000, 2001), Kemmer & Chiao (1998).Supervision of student work on Luo includes Chiao (1988) and Chiao & Schafer (1998) (and http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~ling407/ Luo/main.html, including an interactive, searchable database of Luo sentences and text).Synergistic activities include promotion of cognitive semantics work as documented by her invitation as a Visiting Professor for the 2001 LSA Linguistic Institute, UC Santa Barbara (Cognitive Lexical Semantics course); membership on the Advisory Board of Cognitive Linguistics Research; the Governing Board of the International Cognitive Linguistics Assocation; and Kemmer (1993, and in preparation).

Mechtilde Reh (PhD Cologne 1984, Habilitation Bayreuth 1995) Professor of African Studies, Hamburg. Field research in Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania. Nilotic publications include Reh (1996, 1998, 1999a, 1999b, in press).Synergistic activities include: (1) Co-initiating the interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center “Dealing with social transformation in Africa”, Hamburg University. (2) Co-initiating the interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center “Multilingualism”, Hamburg University.(3) Databank on Experiencer Constructions in African Languages, with cartographic representation of typological results. (4) Research cooperation with Prof. Dr. Petr Zima, Charles University, Prague on “Multilingual literacy practices in cross-cultural perspective”. (5)ibid. with Dr. Kasalina Matovu and Prof. Manuel Muranga, Makerere University, Kampala/Uganda.
 

As US-based researchers, Kemmer and Payne will comprise an executive group responsible for financial decisions concerned with the supplement, though advice of other steering committee members will be sought.Drs. Chet Creider and Mechthild Reh have offered, with alacrity, to seek Canadian and German funding, respectively, for support of Canadian and German participants.(It is unlikely that home institutions or governments will have available resources for Kenyan, Ugandan, and any other African participants. To ensure participation of these generally-underrepresented groups, this proposal seeks funding for both African and US participants.)
 

The steering committee will plan the schedule for each workshop. A qualified undergraduate student will help with logistics including communicating with participants and workshop arrangements. Where possible, network participants will take care of their own travel and housing arrangements, so as to enable the steering committee to focus on substantive intellectual issues. Nevertheless, experience has proven that logistical arrangements must have adequate oversight.Following each workshop, the steering committee will detail the findings and results of the workshop, identify major new research questions that arose out of the workshop, revise plans for the next workshop accordingly, and communicate this to members of the network.

 

5.2 Other core members.Individuals listed below have indicated plans to participate in the network (documentation of agreement can be provided on request).Contacts have been initiated with additional researchers listed in Table 1, and the steering committee is particularly awaiting responses from Kenyan- and Ugandan-based scholars, with whom e-mail contact has not yet been successful (in particular, Drs. Nyombe, Yokwe, Omondi, Okoth-Okombo in Nairobi, and Daniel Owino of Maseno University and Jane Alowo of Makerere University; again, inclusion of native speaker linguists, who are simultaneously underrepresented in professional linguistic circles, will be significantly enhanced by convening workshops in Nairobi, Kenya).

 

6. Information, material sharing, and ongoing life of network
 

The workshops are designed to enhance communication, collaboration, and sharing of materials across widely-scattered researchers.To protect individual members’ intellectual property, the steering committee will develop, pre-circulate, and also present at the workshops a statement regarding acknowledgment of, and rights to, creative ideas, information, data, and materials produced.This statement will include expectations about minimum meta-data standards to be attached to each database or other contribution shared in workshops, where the meta-data will minimally indicate language and dialect, how open or restricted the material is (e.g., because of in-progress work confirming accuracy of data or analysis; also, data shared in confidence with researchers will not be included in circulated materials), name and location of original speaker(s) from whom data was collected (unless such have requested anonymity), identifying information for researchers, and for input-person where electronic databases are concerned, copyrighted publications and software which may be related to circulated data (e.g., sources of, or tools for viewing, data), and sources of institutional support (which may also have claim to intellectual property rights).Participants will be referred to the much more extensive corpus documentation standards developed by the Linguistic Data Consortium (http://www.ldc.upenn.edu) and the Open Language Archives Community (http://www.language-archives.org).
 

With reference to existing databases which participants wish to share in workshop contexts, database creators will be asked to prepare at least an informal document type definition (“DTD”) detailing structure and elements of the database, so as to document unique design features that owe to the work of particular researchers (some may wish to publish these, inorder to protect their intellectual property).As collaborative database development may proceed throughout and beyond the life of the workshops, incorporation of any such features into new or revised database designs will be acknowledged with appropriate citations.
 

The current project will explore development of cross-family searchable databases, both for lexicography and for texts.As discussed above, within the time frame of the workshops we anticipate a pilot project involving two or three well-advanced databases.While (features of) database structures will be coordinated, the databases will be kept as distinct documents with appropriate meta-data as described above.

While web-searchable databases are desirable because they increase access by the international research community as well as by native speakers and interested lay people, work to date on Maa indicates that the web still only marginally allows representation of essential Nilotic phonological information in searchable form.Though industry-wide advances are in process, given the time frame and financial resources available under the current project, pilot project results will be circulated in CD format, along with indication of the relevant software that must be used for searching the databases.The steering committee plans release of the CD to network members within six months of the fourth workshop, if not sooner.

As stated above, the fourth workshop will address the ongoing life of the network via established conferences or other venues, and readiness to begin implementation of web-based searchable databases and/or contribution of databases to already established archives or databanks.(However, support for any web-based implementation will be sought outside the framework of the current proposal.)

 

7. References 

 

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_____1999. Reconstructing the Sociohistorical Background of the Iraqw Language. Afrika und ?bersee 81.185-243.

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_____ 1997b. The Maasai external possessor construction. Essays on Language Function and Language Type. ed. Joan Bybee, John Haiman, and Sandra Thompson., 395-422. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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_____1998. The language of emotion: an analysis of Dholuo on the basis of Grace Ogot's novel "Miaha". Speaking of Emotions: Conceptualisation and Expression, ed. Angeliki Athanasiadou & E. Tabakowska. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 375-408.

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_____1999b. 'Body', 'back', and 'belly' – or: On the antonyms of 'inside' and their conceptual sources. Frankfurter Afrikanistische Bl?tter 11.

_____ in press. "Functions of the preposition kuom in Dholuo", ed. Hubert Cuyskens & Thomas Berg. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

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