Wishing you all the best in this new phase of your life.
I want to share a short story about what a profound effect you had on my thinking on reduplication.
I was fortunate to be a post-doc at UBC when your were developing an analysis of Yoruba reduplication in the late 1990’s. I'm not sure if you remember, but we had a very engaging discussion about what the most appropriate mechanism would be to account for the shape and allomorphs in reduplication. I was convinced that some form of prosodic unit would be best and you were presenting arguments in favour of an atemplatic approach. It was one of the most stimulating discussions of reduplication I had while at UBC. I went away thinking that you made some very strong points, so changed my analysis of Halkomelem continuative reduplication and allomorphy to be atemplatic. I think you then wrote up your paper on Yoruba reduplication with the dual approach, using prosodic units for partial reduplication. I think we convinced each other of doing things the other way.
Well, all these years later, I am back to prosodic units as templates, in large part due to your brilliant paper on Yoruba reduplication.
Thanks Doug – for all your passion, brilliance, and enthusiasm for all things phonological!! I will always treasure and admire your insights and prolific work on phonological knowledge and related cognitive systems.