In memoriam: Prof. John Ohala

We were very saddened to hear of the passing of Prof. John Ohala (UC Berkeley Linguistics) on 22 August 2020.

Prof. Ohala was one of the most eminent phoneticians and phonologists of the 20th and 21st centuries, making numerous contributions to the fields. He will be perhaps best remembered for his ideas on how phonologies are constrained by the psycho-physical make-up of listeners and speakers, as demonstrated e.g. in his two 1981 papers, “Listener as the source of sound change” and “Articulatory constraints on the cognitive representation of speech”. His interests were, however, much broader than that; he worked on such topics as prosody, vowel inventories, vowel harmony, assimilation, epenthesis and sound symbolism. A leitmotif of his work was the insistence on the experimental character of phonetics; he was the originator of the term “experimental phonology”.

Prof. Ohala held many academic positions and honours, including that of President of the International Phonetic Association in 1995–1999. Importantly for us, he was a close collaborator and valued friend of the AMU Faculty of English. He visited Poznań on several occasions, most recently in 2009 with a guest lecture and in 2007 for the 38th Poznań Linguistic Meeting (PLM). He served on the International Advisory Boards of PLM and of Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics. Several Faculty of English authors enjoyed the opportunity of using his comments and recommendations in their published work. Prof. Ohala was expected to be a Fulbright Visiting Professor at AMU in 2017–2018.

He will be sadly missed.

– PSiCL Editorial Team