David Arnold Odden (born 1954) is professor of Linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 at Ohio State University

Ohio State University

The Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...

. His contributions to linguistics have been in the area of phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

 and language description, most notably African tone and the description of Bantu languages

Bantu languages

The Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...

. In addition, his work on the obligatory contour principle

Obligatory Contour Principle

The Obligatory Contour Principle is a phonological hypothesis that states that consecutive identical features are banned in underlying representations.-Background considerations:...

 (OCP) has been instrumental to an understanding of that phenomenon. He is the former editor of Studies in African Linguistics and a current editorial board member of Natural Language and Linguistic Theories.

Odden received his BA in linguistics from the University of Washington

University of Washington

University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...

 in 1975 and his PhD. from University of Illinois in 1981. From 1981 to 1984 he taught at Washington State University, Michigan State University

Michigan State University

Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...

 and Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 before joining the faculty of Ohio State University in 1985. He was made a full professor there in 1999. Odden was also the Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Durham in 2003 and Fulbright Professor at the University of Tromsø

University of Tromsø

The University of Tromsø is the world's northernmost university. Located in the city of Tromsø, Norway, it was established in 1968, and opened in 1972. It is one of eight universities in Norway. The University of Tromsø is the largest research and educational institution in northern Norway...

, Norway from 1999 to 2000.

Selected works

• 2005. Introducing Phonology. Cambridge University Press.
• 1996. The Phonology and Morphology of Kimaatuumbi. Oxford University Press.
• 1995. Tone: African Languages. In J. Goldsmith (ed.) The handbook of phonological theory.
• 1991. Vowel geometry. In Phonology 8.261-89.
• 1988. Anti antigemination and the OCP. In Linguistic Inquiry 19.451-75.
• 1986. On the role of the obligatory contour principle in phonological theory. In Language 62.353-83.

External links

• David Odden's webpage, Ohio State University
  Ohio State University
  The Ohio State University, commonly referred to as Ohio State, is a public research university located in Columbus, Ohio. It was originally founded in 1870 as a land-grant university and is currently the third largest university campus in the United States...