Bob Ladd: Research interests
References below are linked to entries on my
publications page
Intonation and prosody
Since the time of my PhD, my research has always focused on
intonation
and prosody. My PhD thesis was published in book form by Indiana
University Press as The Structure of Intonational Meaning (1980).
Probably
the most important parts of the thesis were the chapters on accent
placement, focus, deaccenting, etc. (see also 1980,
1983b). However,
since my PhD I have done little
more on that general topic, except for a chapter in
my 1996 book.
Instead, much of my work has
concentrated on intonational phonetics and phonology. One aspect of
the phonetic work was the development of a model for synthetic intonation
during my first several years in Edinburgh, in collaboration with
others at the Centre for Speech
Technology Research (CSTR), in particular
Alex Monaghan (1990a,
1990c). Another aspect has been a
continuing theoretical critique of certain features of the mainstream
Pierrehumbert analysis of English (e.g. 1983a,
1986,
1990a,
1993b ,
2003a). A
third aspect has been experimental work on various aspects of intonational
phonetics, especially pitch range (1985,
1988,
1994,
1997) and, more
recently, the alignment of pitch and segmental features
(1998,
2000b,
2003a,
2004a,
2005a,
2005b,
2006a,
2006b,
2006d,
2006e,
2009a,
2009b).
Much of this work was brought together
in my book Intonational Phonology, published in 1996 by Cambridge
University Press. A second
edition
of this book appeared in late 2008. The
second edition includes new
material on the last ten years of instrumental phonetic research on
intonation, and on the rapid developments in ToBI transcription systems,
and has an
associated web resource with sound files for all the
examples in the book. A kind of outgrowth of the book is a tutorial
paper (2008d) on prosodic fieldwork, by Nikolaus
Himmelmann and myself,
which appeared in Language Documentation and
Conservation.
Alignment of pitch and segmentals
My work on the alignment of pitch features with the segmental
string was part of three externally-funded projects:
· A project on the phonetics and
phonology of Greek intonation,
funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (1995-97;
co-principal investigators were myself and
Amalia Arvaniti and the
research associate was
Ineke Mennen). The first paper from this project, which has been
widely cited,
appeared in Journal of Phonetics
(1998); more recent publications include one
on intonation and focus
in Greek yes/no questions in Speech
Communication (2006b) and one
on the phonology and
phonetics of "rising-falling" intonation contours in
Language and Speech (2006d). A
final paper (2009b) on the
intonation of WH-questions appeared in Phonology.
There are also
some single-authored
papers by
Arvaniti.
· Growing out of the work on the Greek project,
a project
on the alignment of pitch
targets in Dutch and English,
funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (1998-2001; co-PIs
were myself and Ineke Mennen; the main
paid researcher on the project was
Astrid Schepman;
from September 2000 the work was carried
on by
Robin Lickley). Two major papers from this project
have appeared in JASA (1999
and 2000b), four
in Journal of Phonetics
(2003a,
2004a,
2005a,
2006a), and one in Language
and Speech (2005b). In November
2009 the 2004a and
2006a papers both figured on the list of top 10 cited papers from the past
5 years on the JPhon web site.
· In conjunction with the Dutch project, a project on alignment
and vowel length in Scottish and Southern
British English, funded in part by a small grant from the British Academy.
A paper (2009a) on this work appeared in
Journal of Phonetics.
Beyond intonation
Laboratory phonology
Beyond intonation, I have been involved
in
the development of
Laboratory Phonology. I was co-organiser (with Gerry
Docherty) of the Second Conference on Laboratory Phonology in
Edinburgh
in 1989 (published in book form in
1992), and I have seen much of my
experimental work on intonation as a contribution to phonology
(especially
1990b,
1993a,
1993b,
1998,
2000b,
2000c,
2003a,
2004a). During
the 1990s, in collaboration with
Jim
Scobbie of
Queen
Margaret University, I carried out
a study of consonant duration in Sardinian
(finally published as
2003b), which is relevant to phonological
theories of assimilation and gemination.
Growing out of this work
I have also begun to work on
theoretical issues related to surface contrast (2000a,
2006c), and am contributing a chapter on
"phonetics in phonology" (forthcoming),
to the second edition of Blackwell's
Handbook of Phonological Theory. From January 2007 to July 2008 I
was on an 18-month extended
research
leave, funded by an
Individual Research
Fellowship from the Leverhulme
Trust. I am in the (probably slow) process of writing up the results
of this work.
Nilotic languages
From September 2005 to December 2008 I was - nominally at least -
Principal Investigator on a
project on stress and tone
in
Nilotic languages, in particular Dinka and Shilluk. The
project was the initiative of
Bert Remijsen, who
was officially a Research Associate on the project but in practice was in
charge of much of
the project's work. Leoma Gilley of SIL and Caguor Adong Manyang of the
University of Bahr
El-Ghazal in Southern Sudan were also involved in the project, as was
Peter Ladefoged
until his death in January 2006. A paper (2008c)
on the Dinka tone system by Remijsen and Ladd appeared last year in
Journal
of African Languages and Linguistics. A paper on Dinka quantity
contrasts by Remijsen and Gilley has appeared in JPhon, and
a general sketch of the phonetics of the Luanyjang dialect by Remijsen and
Manyang in JIPA. A short report on irregularity in noun number
morphology (2009c) by Ladd,
Remijsen and
Manyang recently
appeared in
Language. The Nilotic prosody project was
succeeded in January 2009 by a new project on
"Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song", funded within the AHRC's "Beyond Text" programme, and once
again run primarily by Bert Remijsen.
Collaborators on this project are Miriam
Meyerhoff of Edinburgh and Angela
Impey of SOAS. An official
web site is under development.
Language and genes
During much of 2005-06, I was engaged in a research
project with Dan Dediu on the relation
between the geographical distribution of tone languages and the
geographical distribution of the adaptive haplogroups of the two brain
size genes ASPM and Microcephalin. This was entirely
speculative unfunded research of the sort that used
to be normal in universities but is now marginalised by the idea that the
only research that counts is research that attracts outside funding. On
my part it involved correspondence and discussion with fieldworkers
(and digging through published sources) on roughly 40 languages spoken by
49 Old
World populations; on Dan's part it involved trawling through publicly
available genetic databases for information on the same 49 populations and
running extremely complex statistical analyses. The project would
never have been fundable through conventional sources, but the results
were published last year in PNAS (2007a)
and attracted considerable attention. More information can be found
here; a
commentary paper by Dan, Anna Kinsella and myself on
the
implications of this research appeared in March 2008 in the new online
journal Biolinguistics. A response to that commentary by Joshua
Bowles appeared in Biolinguistics in September 2008, together with
our reply. Dan is now at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and our collaboration is continuing.
updated November 2009
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