Bob Ladd: Research interests
References below are linked to entries on my
publications page
Intonation and prosody
From the time of my PhD until quite recently, my research was
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,
following my PhD I did little
more on that general topic, except for a chapter in
my book Intonational Phonology.
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 (e.g. 1990a). Another aspect 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,
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 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
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.
Beyond intonation
Throughout my career I have been involved in research on topics other than
intonation and prosody, and since about 2000 this other work has been
my major interest.
Laboratory phonology
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
theoretical issues related to surface contrast (2000a,
2006c); my most recent contribution in this area is a chapter on
"phonetics in phonology" (2011) in
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. The main goal of this project was to write a
book on "Simultaneous and
Sequential Structure in Language". Despite many delays, the book (under the title Sequence and Simultaneity
in Sound Structure) is now
in press with Oxford University Press, and should appear in early 2014.
A development of the
Leverhulme fellowship was a collaboration with Pascal Belin and
Patricia
Bestelmeyer of the University of Glasgow on the neural processing
mechanisms involved in the perception of social and regional accents.
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 in
Journal
of African Languages and Linguistics. A paper on Dinka quantity
contrasts by Remijsen and Gilley 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
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, which formally finished in March 2012. (Our section of the official
Beyond Text web site is
here.)
Co-investigators on this project were
Angela
Impey of SOAS and
Miriam
Meyerhoff of Auckland (formerly of Edinburgh). Once
again the project was run primarily by Bert Remijsen. We also had collaborators in Sudan (after July 2011, in
South Sudan), including Peter Malek, Elizabeth Achol Deng, and Simon Yak Deng Yak. Major outputs include a CD of
Dinka songs and a book children's songs (with a CD) aimed at promoting literacy in Dinka. Fruits of my own work
on this project include a paper on possible improvements
to Dinka orthography and a
paper on interactions between
musical melody and linguistic tone, presented at a workshop in Vienna in July 2012, which will soon
appear in the proceedings of the workshop.
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-1. 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 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; the most recent product of our
collaboration (with several others) is a paper
on individual differences in the perception of pitch in
missing-fundamental tones, which is in press at
the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance (and will be posted here soon).
updated April 2013
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