Bob Ladd: Research interests
References below are linked to entries on my
publications page, some of which are then linked to the papers (I'm working on the rest).
Alignment of pitch and segmentals
Laboratory Phonology
Tone Languages
Language and music
Intonation and prosody
From the time of my PhD until the early 2000s, my research was
focused on intonation
and prosody. My Cornell 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). At about the same time, I presented a paper (1981)
at the Chicago Linguistics Society about the intonation of
English tag questions, in which I made an informal proposal
about the semantics of negative questions that has subsequently
acquired a life of its own in the formal semantics literature under the rubric
"Ladd's ambiguity".
However, after moving to Europe in 1981 I did little
more on intonational meaning and pragmatics, except for a chapter in
my book Intonational Phonology (and except insofar as my
ideas about intonational meaning influenced the
experimental work on intonation and emotion we did in Klaus Scherer's lab
in Giessen, e.g.
1984c,
1985). 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. More important for my later work was a
continuing theoretical critique of certain features of the mainstream
Pierrehumbert analysis of English and its offshoot ToBI (e.g. 1983a,
1986,
1990a,
1993b ,
2003a). A
third aspect was experimental work on various aspects of intonational
phonetics, especially pitch range (1985,
1988,
1994,
1997)
and, somewhat later, the alignment of
pitch and
segmental features
(1998,
2000b,
2003a,
2004,
2005,
2006a,
2006b,
2006d,
2009a,
2009b).
Much of this work was brought together
in my book Intonational Phonology, first published in 1996 by
Cambridge
University Press. A
second edition
of this book appeared in late 2008, and summarises most of what I have to
say about intonation and prosody. The
second edition includes new
material on instrumental phonetic research on
intonation and on the rapid developments in ToBI transcription systems,
and an
associated web resource with sound files for all the
examples in the book.
Outgrowths of the second edition include: a tutorial paper (2008d) on prosodic fieldwork, by Nikolaus
Himmelmann and myself; a historical note (2015a) on Kenneth Pike and the four-level American
structuralist analysis of intonation; and a critical review of ToBI
(2022a) that appeared in Prosodic Theory and Practice, a collection of papers edited by
Jonathan Barnes and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel. A Chinese translation
of the second edition appeared in 2022.
I continue to be interested in questions about the nature of stress and accent. I have presented
preliminary versions of my ideas at several summer school mini-courses since 2017 (see e.g.
this course handout). A review
article on this general topic by myself and Amalia Arvaniti appeared in the Annual Review
of Linguistics in 2023.
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; in 2015 this triggered a response by Yi Xu and
his colleagues, to which we replied briefly (2015e).
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
appeared in JASA (1999
and 2000b), three
in Journal of Phonetics
(2003a,
2004,
2006a), and one in Language
and Speech (2005).
· 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.
See also
this talk, which I presented at a symposium in honour of Gösta
Bruce in 2007.
Beyond intonation
Throughout my career I have been involved in research on topics other than
intonation and prosody, and since the early 2000s these other interests have largely
taken precedence in my work.
Perhaps most importantly, 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,
2004). 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 been interested in
theoretical issues related to surface contrast (2000a,
2006c). This interest is the background to several publications: my chapter
on "phonetics in phonology" (2011) in
the second edition of Blackwell's Handbook of Phonological Theory (and see the critical
review of that
chapter by Klaus Kohler in Phonetica);
my paper (2022b) on mid-20th century
"post-Bloomfieldian" phonology, which appeared the Oxford History of Phonology; and
a paper (2016c) on Italian vowel contrasts with Peggy Renwick of
Johns Hopkins University.
(The 2011 handbook chapter on "phonetics in phonology" was reprinted in my 2014
book Simultaneous
Structure in Phonology; this book is the belated fruit of a research
leave in
2007-08, funded
by the Leverhulme Trust.)
A more recent series of laboratory phonology projects has focused on
segment-related perturbations of fundamental frequency and their relevance for the phonology of
voicing. My former Edinburgh colleague James Kirby and I published
a paper (2016b) on obstruent F0 perturbations in French and Italian
(later followed up by a short paper
(2020a) in JASA Express Letters).
A paper by myself and Stephan Schmid on F0 effects of aspiration and "voicing" in Swiss German (2018)
appeared in a special issue of Journal of Phonetics on VOT. A
replication and further extension of
that paper (based on PhD work by two of Schmid's students, Franka Zebe-Sheng and Camille Watter)
is about to appear in Journal of Phonetics.
Nilotic prosody 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. The fruits of this project include: a paper (2008c)
on the Dinka tone system by Remijsen and Ladd in
Journal
of African Languages and Linguistics; a paper on Dinka quantity
contrasts by Remijsen and Gilley in JPhon; a general sketch of the phonetics of the
Luanyjang dialect by Remijsen and
Manyang in JIPA; a paper discussing possible improvements to Dinka orthography, posted
here;
and a short report on irregularity in noun number
morphology (2009c) by Ladd,
Remijsen and Manyang, which appeared in Language.
In 2020 I returned to the question of irregularity in
Dinka number morphology in collaboration with Mirella Blum,
who was doing a PhD with Bert Remijsen. Largely rejecting the conclusion reached in the
(2009c)paper, we showed that Dinka noun number
morphology is considerably more systematic and predictable than it has traditionally been said to be, and
published a report (2021b) on this work in the
Journal of African Languages and Linguistics. Mirella's
PhD, among other things, then laid
the groundwork for her ongoing cross-dialect study of tonal correspondences in several three-tone
and four-tone Dinka dialects, which in turn has led us to further work on regularities in
noun number marking. A new paper by Blum and Ladd on that work is under review.
Tone, Genes and Pitch Processing During much of 2005-06, I was engaged in a speculative
(i.e. unfunded) 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-1.
My part of the project involved digging up information on roughly 40 languages spoken by
49 Old World populations; Dan's part involved trawling through publicly
available genetic databases for information on the same 49 populations and
running extremely complex statistical analyses.
The results
were published in PNAS (2007a)
and attracted considerable attention; more information can be found
here and here.
Our collaboration continued for several years while Dan was at the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. Products of this
collaboration (with other co-authors) include: a paper
on individual differences in the perception of pitch in
missing-fundamental tones (2013a); a paper
on factors affecting the ability to use tonal information in an
artificial-language implicit learning
task (2015c); a
review paper on correlational studies in linguistic typology (2015b);
a commentary on the
proposal by Caleb Everett et al. that tone languages are more
likely in areas of high humidity (2016a); and more recently, a
long paper by Dan in PLOS-1
reevaluating our original study and reaffirming our claim of a link between ASPM
and tone. I tie some of these
strands together in this
talk.
Other Between 2016 and 2019 Bruce
Connell and I prepared an English translation, with
extensive commentaries, of Emmi Meyer's Mambila-Studie, the first published
description of the Mambila language of the Cameroon-Nigeria borderland. The original appeared
in three instalments in the forerunner to the journal Afrika und Übersee in 1939-40; the
translation
appeared in 2020 to mark the 80th anniversary of the original publication.
Music has mostly remained on the fringes of my research, but the connection between music and
the use of pitch in language - intonation and tone - is hard to ignore. I presented a
talk on the different structuring of
pitch range in speech and music at a symposium marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of
Lerdahl and Jackendoff's Generative Theory of Tonal Music in 2008.
I became more formally involved in music research when the Nilotic prosody project described above 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" initiative.
Major outputs include a book of children's songs (with a CD) aimed at promoting literacy in
Dinka, a demo CD of Dinka songs,
and a large
collection of Dinka songs in the British Library's Sound Archive.
My own particular interest
in the Dinka song project was the interaction between linguistic tone and musical melody.
These interactions are another focus of my ongoing collaborations with
James Kirby. I was officially his mentor on an AHRC
Early Career Fellowship on music/tone interactions in Vietnamese and Thai (see 2016d), and we organised a workshop
at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Glasgow in 2015
on the constraints that underlie tone/melody correspondences in singing in tone languages.
We also wrote a general review/tutorial paper on this topic
(2020b)
which appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Prosody edited by Carlos Gussenhoven
and Aoju Chen. A further paper (2022c) on this topic appeared in
the journal Studies in Prosodic Grammar (韵律语法研究).
updated September 2025
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