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My first in-person encounter with Doug was when we shared an office at the LSA Summer Institute in Boulder, CO, in the summer of 2011. I was of course thoroughly intimidated as a newly minted professor to be sharing an office with esteemed colleagues like Doug, but he soon set me at ease and then […]

It’s good to have a mentor. If it’s not someone who already works where you work, it’s great if they can show up in your city during their sabbatical, especially when you’re a few years into your first tenure-track job and feeling particularly lost. It’s nice, but not necessary, if it’s someone who used to […]

Doug and I belong to a club named Scorpio at the university of Ibadan where he did his first degree. Scorpio is a club established for the purpose of having fun on Campus so we organize parties, picnic just for the purpose letting out steam when the academic duties get us to a point of […]

While I am currently a colleague of Doug’s, I was once a student of Doug’s. I did my undergraduate degree at SFU, and while there, had the crazy idea to take advantage of the Western Deans agreement and take a course at UBC. This was somewhat unusual for an undergrad, and it was a very […]

Félicitations Papa! You finally made it to a life of leisure! Some of my favorite childhood memories are tied to linguistics—parties filled with laughter (and food, always food!), sharing moin moin, Sri Lankan treats with Edna and Carmen, and the countless meals that seemed to come with every academic gathering. Later, at UBC, your office […]

I first became acquainted with Doug’s work while working in Ghana in the late 1980s, when a colleague loaned me a copy of Doug’s MIT dissertation Tone in Lexical Phonology (which, if I remember correctly, he had purchased in hard copy directly from the MIT library!). I was in the fairly early stages of work […]

Congratulations, Doug, and welcome to the wonderful world of retirement where discounts are plenty, meetings non-existent and reading and travel are done for pleasure! You will love it! Before you embark on that new adventure, it is appropriate for those of us who have had the pleasure of working with you to publicly share our […]

When I was admitted to the PhD program in Linguistics at UBC, it was my first time traveling outside of East Africa. I remember reaching out to the department, asking how I would know where to go after I landed at YVR. Doug responded with kind words: "I will come pick you up from the […]

Congratulations, Doug, on your retirement! It’s hard to believe that it’s 25 years since I was last affiliated with UBC. The years I spent there seem like they should be more recent because they were so formative for me, and not just because I was at the beginning of my career when all experiences were […]

The Chinese have a saying. You can take the true mettle of a person once you’ve seen them gambling or drunk. I would like to add, “Or when you have been treated badly by an editor.” Several years ago, perhaps close to 20, Doug submitted a ms. to Linguistic Inquiry, the journal that I have […]

Dr Dg, yr cntrbtns t th ltrtr n vclc ndrspcfctn nsprd s mch f m wn wrk n phnlgy tht * fgrd d wlk th wlk n ths pprctn msg. OK enough of that. Plus, some people think "y" and "w" and "r" and even sometimes "l" are vowels. Underspecification is all related to contrast, […]

Thank you Prof Doug. I first met you in 1989 when I registered as a Masters student at University of Ottawa coming from South Africa. You lectured me in Phonology. You then became my promoter for my MA Thesis entitled Vowel Harmony in Setswana. An African Language spoken in South Africa. Due to the end […]

Douglas as I Remember Him I was no longer in the Department of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria, when Douglas came there in the early to mid-1970s specifically to study both Yoruba and undergraduate linguistics. However, news of his academic excellence and dogged determination […]