David Odden (original) (raw)

David Arnold Odden (/ˈoʊdən/; born 1954) is professor emeritus of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. His contributions to linguistics have been in the area of phonology and language description, most notably African tone and the description of Bantu languages. In addition, his work on the obligatory contour principle (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.