In 1988 my wife and I began an SIL field assignment in Congo (Brazzaville) with the Babole people in the Likouala Region (the language was Di-bole, the people, Ba-bole). While living in the village of Dzeke, or perhaps the regional capital of Impfondo, I had gotten a copy of, and read, Doug Pulleyblank’s (1986) book ‘Tone in Lexical Phonology’. It was so helpful and clear that when thoughts of a PhD in linguistics entered my brain, it was easy for me to reach out to Doug, tell him of my interest in his book, and enquire about studying with him. We showed up in Vancouver in August 1992 with two small children in tow to begin a 4 year stint in the UBC linguistics department.
In those days, Optimality Theory was just breaking over the phonology scene like a tsunami coming ashore. We were reading ‘technical report’ copies of Prince and Smolensky (1993), Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar (sort of a pre-publication draft). John McCarthy came to UVIC at one point (was that 1993?) and a group of us went over on the ferry to hear him talk about OT. It was a good time to be a PhD student in phonology, with lots of ferment in the field, and a feeling of excitement about how this constraint-based theory could open up new possibilities of enquiry and explanation. Looking back, we certainly didn’t fully understand how embedded OT was in computational-cognitive approaches like Connectionism, and Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP). In fact, it would take another three decades for me to appreciate the debate between connectionism and linguistics that was already in full swing in 1992. We PhD students were more focused on seeing how OT could make our phonological analyses tighter, and show that contraints worked better than rules for getting good analyses. Alan Prince and Steven Pinker in a 1988 article in the journal Cognition (vol. 28) were already having a serious battle with Rumelhart and McLelland’s (1986) proposal about English past tense irregular forms. It literally took me three decades after 1992 to appreciate how significant that debate really was, and how it was a precursor to the ‘emergentist’ theme that is increasingly familiar in linguistics, and some version of which is championed in ‘Emergent Phonology’ (Archangeli and Pulleyblank 2021).
It turned out that OT did provide fertile ground for the work on Bantu vowel harmony that captured my attention in 1993 and eventually became a dissertation. The ground-breaking work on Yoruba Vowel Harmony (Archangeli and Pulleyblank 1989) was became sort of a guiding template for my own work on Bantu C. vowel harmony. Yoruba Vowel Harmony (1989) was a mini-graduate level seminar in Vowel Harmony. The story changed from the 1989 paper with the arrival of constraint-based analyses, but the basic insights of the 1989 Yoruba Vowel Harmony paper remained the gold standard for what needed to be addressed in any study of that sort.
Doug invited Larry Hyman to be the external reader for my dissertation. Larry’s research interests in Bantu Vowel Harmony turned coincided significantly with my own and he was a solid contact for many years in the Bantu linguistics circuit. After the PhD corrections, and an evacuation from civil war in Congo Brazzaville (both in 1997), we ended up in Cameroon and I found myself sitting one day in the office of Professor Sam Chumbow, who was then Rector of the University of Buea (an Anglophone university in Cameroon). Also present was Phillipe Mutaka (of Kinande fame). I was hoping to help them teach linguistics at the University of Buea with my newly minted PhD skills. At one point in the meeting Dr. Mutaka turned to Dr. Chumbow and said something like: “Well, Doug has sent Myles to us, so we better put him to work”. You see, Sam Chumbow had known Doug from Ibadan (Nigeria) when Doug was an undergraduate there in linguistics, and Sam was a young professor. That was the beginning of a fruitful period of work for me at Buea University, teaching Syntax and Phonology. Knowing Doug personally, and having worked with him as his student, drew me into a network with a whole cadre of African colleagues.
When I hear about Doug Pulleyblank ‘retiring’ I am thinking: “Yeah, sure!” Doug’s way of thinking, teaching and interacting reached out to me through his published research even before I met him. Even now, that influence is continuing through his current work on Emergent Phonology, which I am reading with interest. The story is not over yet. I am grateful for the influence Doug and his colleagues have had on my life and work. Thanks, Doug, for the example of curiosity and hard work. Please do enjoy a different pace in your ‘retirement’. I look forward to continuing to watch what you are thinking about. We’ll see what ‘emerges’ from Emergent Phonology and where that new direction takes us. We still have to figure out how Dibole is different from Yoruba, both with 7 vowel, [rtr]-active VH systems. While Yoruba riffs on the supportive ‘grounded’ relationship between [rtr] and [lo], Dibole strictly segregates [rtr] and [lo], and refuses to have them in the same domains, enforcing ‘anti-grounding’, as you once put it. Perhaps there is an elegant way of explaining that difference, but I suspect the answer will lie in the direction of connectionist understandings of phonology that are not fully articulated yet.
Myles Leitch PhD
UBC 1992-1997