At the moment, Frank is engaged in typological and comparative work on the discourse functions of tense-aspect forms. A topic of particular interest to him are so-called narrative tenses, which are said to mark the sequence of events reported. Newer research suggests that this narrow sequential view falls short in explaining the functions of these markers in many cases. These forms are better analyzed as signaling an "insertive" function that marks event membership in previously established situations/worlds/temporal spaces. Frank plans to expand his research to other African languages, many of which feature such narrative forms.At the theoretical level, he is interested in exploring and developing the conceptual foundations of documentary linguistic outcomes as part of a transdisciplinary philological enterprise. Despite the realization that documentation records are more and more of interest to non-linguists, the deposits in language archives such as the Endangered Languages Archives (ELAR), University of London, or the DOBES Archive, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen are still predominately created by linguists for linguists. Frank argued for recasting documentary linguistics as a philological endeavor. This opens up documentary linguistics to continuous cross-disciplinary integration centered on a broad understanding of language. On the one hand, this ties documentary linguistics theoretically to other academic fields of study centered on language, such as, for example, the interpretative and semiotic approaches of Anthropological Linguistics. On the other hand this enables non-academic interaction, such as the canonization of language documents by language communities. Frank hopes that all of these efforts eventually contribute to a world that values linguistic diversity and multilingualism and enables us to share in the joy of actually listening to many different voices.