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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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