Theory and description in African linguistics

This collection contains 36 papers presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley from March 23-March 26, 2016.1 This meeting of ACAL coincided with a special workshop entitled “Areal features and linguistic reconstruction in Africa”, and we are glad to include four papers from that workshop in this collection as well. Collectively, these papers add a sizable body of scholarship to the study of African languages, including valuable new descriptions of African languages, novel theoretical analyses of them, and important insights into our typological and historical understanding of these languages. These papers also provide an sample of the depth and richness of contemporary scholarship in linguistics, both in terms of the efficacy of current theories in analyzing language as well as the progress that has been made in describing African languages over the last few decades. Still, much work remains.