We are very pleased to introduce an informal selection of squibs, thoughts, puzzles and papers to celebrate Doug Pulleyblank and his many contributions to linguistics and linguists. This collection, presented to Doug on the occasion of his retirement from UBC in Spring 2025, includes all manner of problems relating to the subjects he is famous for studying: vowel harmony, tonal phonology, the languages of Africa, ’emergent’ phonological structure, and the perennial search for the phonological analysis that gets it *just right*. In keeping with Doug’s spirit of intellectual curiosity, the collection also includes studies of child phonology, labiodentals, ‘crazy’ rules, lexical stress, Stratal OT, the pseudo-cycle, finite state transducers, grammatical particles, and iconicity — as well as an exploration of UBC history and lexical/social meaning, a tribute to Doug’s early career years from the President of the Cameroon Academy of Sciences, a retirement to-do list from Diana Archangeli, and much more.
We hope that these squibs amuse and intrigue Doug, now that he’s got some more time to enjoy such amusements, and that they inspire others to continue puzzling in the same spirit. — Kathleen Currie Hall, Gunnar Ó. Hansson and Anne-Michelle Tessier, April 2025.
| Author(s) | Title | |
| Ọladiipọ Ajiboye | Architecture of Grammatical Particles in Yorùbá: Form, Function, and Distribution | |
| Samuel Kayode Akinboa and Alexander Angsongna | Relationship between iconicity and grammatical integration as a product of the integrator | |
| Akinbiyi Akinlabi | Cross Consonantal Spreading in Yoruba Numerals | |
| B. Allen | Segmentally untethered tonal contour production in a pre-multilingual toddler | |
| Diana Archangeli | Retirement To-Do List | |
| Ọladele Awobuluyi | The Third-Person Singular Short Subject Pronoun in Standard Yoruba | |
| Alexandra Lilia Ayala, Kaili Vesik and Zara Khalaji Pirbaluti | Keeping it (Output) Strictly Local: A Finite State Model of Phonological Patterns in Kera | |
| Eric Baković | When harmony fails, markedness prevails | |
| Wm. G. Bennett & Jeremy Perkins | Tone patterns of Xhosa nonce verbs | |
| Jason Brown | The Role of Adjacency in Defining the Base of Reduplication | |
| Beban Sammy Chumbow | A tribute to Prof. Douglas Pulleyblank: ‘On Coming of Age’ | |
| Darin Flynn | What the f? F-elements behind labiodentals and crazy rules | |
| Joash J. Gambarage | Ku-Support Divergence in Tanzanian and Kenyan Swahili | |
| José Ignacio Hualde | What is lexical stress and how does it shift? | |
| Larry M. Hyman (with Mwaambi G. Mbûûi) | The Mystery of the Level Low Tone in Tiania | |
| Abiodun Samuel Ibikunle | The Phonological Resolution of Low Tone Sequences in Òmùò-Òkè Dialect of Yorùbá | |
| Paul Kiparsky | Reconstructing Bantu and Niger-Congo syntax: Questions for Doug | |
| Connor Mayer & Bryan Gick | Modeling Japanese voiced velar nasalization in Emergent Phonology: An embodied approach to frequency effects | |
| Roger Yu-Hsiang Lo & Molly Babel | What tones emerge in Cantonese spontaneous speech? | |
| Sharon Rose | Low vowel alternations in African ATR harmony systems: an expanded typology | |
| Hotze Rullmann | Tracking the Colonial History of UBC’s ‘Great Trek’ | |
| Donca Steriade | Monosyllabic -able and the pseudo-cycle | |
| Noriko Yamane | Tongue Root as Enhancement and Emergence |