John Ohala

John Ohala was an American linguist born July 19, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois, and died August 23, 2020, in Berkeley, California, who earned his PhD from UCLA in 1969 under Peter Ladefoged and became professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He specialized in phonetics and phonology and is best known for arguing that many recurring patterns in the sound systems of languages derive from physical and physiological constraints on speech production and perception rather than from purely formal grammatical rules. He extended this reasoning through ethological principles drawn from animal behavior to explain prosodic patterns, sound symbolism, and facial expression in language, and his work appeared widely in the Journal of Phonetics; he later mentored the linguist John Kingston.