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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). 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 (in work by e.g. Han and Romero, Gunlogson, Holmberg, and Krifka).

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 has an associated web resource with sound files for all the examples in the book. (When you get to the web page, click on "Resources" - the sound files are then arranged by chapter.) A Chinese translation of the second edition appeared in 2022. 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. More recently I published (2015a) a short historical note on the four-level American structuralist analysis of intonation, which appeared in Historiographica Linguistica; a further outgrowth of the book is a critical review of ToBI that appeared in Prosodic Theory and Practice, a collection of papers edited by Jonathan Barnes and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel (2022a).

Most recently I have returned to 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 recently appeared in the Annual Review of Linguistics.

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; 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.

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.

Laboratory phonology

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, and brings together essays on the interaction of the different streams of information in the speech signal. An unplanned consequence of my work on this book was a collaboration with Pascal Belin and Patricia Bestelmeyer (both formerly of the University of Glasgow) on the neural processing mechanisms involved in the perception of social and regional accents; a paper on this work (2015d) appeared in Cerebral Cortex. A further derivative of the book is a paper (2022b) on mid-20th century "post-Bloomfieldian" phonology, which appeared the Oxford History of Phonology, edited by Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst.

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 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.

Tone languages

In 2020 I returned to the question of irregularity in Dinka number morphology in collaboration with Mirella Blum, a PhD student who is working with Bert Remijsen on his latest funded project Suprasegmentals in three West Nilotic languages. We were able to show that Dinka noun number morphology is considerably less irregular and unpredictable than it has traditionally been said to be. We recently published a paper (2022b) on this work in the Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, which among other things laid the groundwork for Blum's ongoing cross-dialect study of tonal correspondences in several three-tone and four-tone Dinka varieties.

Tone, Genes and Pitch Processing During much of 2005-06, I was engaged in a 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 then new online journal Biolinguistics. Our collaboration continued for several years while Dan was at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen; products of this collaboration are a paper (with several others) on individual differences in the perception of pitch in missing-fundamental tones (2013a), a paper (also with several others) on factors affecting the ability to use tonal information in an artificial-language implicit learning task (2015c), a review paper (with co-author Seán Roberts) on correlational studies in linguistic typology (2015b), and a commentary on the proposal by Caleb Everett et al. that tone languages are more likely in areas of high humidity because humid air permits more precise laryngeal control of pitch (2016a). I tie some of these strands together in this talk.

Dan is now at ICREA in Barcelona and continues to study the effects on language of extra-linguistic factors such as vocal tract anatomy. In 2020 Patrick Wong and his collaborators in Hong Kong published a paper that provides experimental evidence for the original Dediu/Ladd conjecture that ASPM (though not Microcephalin) is linked to individual differences in the ability to process linguistic tone. Dan has followed up this new evidence with a long paper in PLOS-1 reevaluating our original study and reaffirming our claim that the link between ASPM and tone provides evidence that biological differences between human groups may provide part of the explanation for differences between human languages.

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 Afrika und Übersee in 1939-40; the translation appeared in 2020 to mark the 80th anniversary of the original publication.

Language and Music

My own particular interest in the Dinka song project was the interaction between linguistic tone and musical melody. These interactions are the other 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 on this topic is to appear in the journal Studies in Prosodic Grammar (韵律语法研究).

updated December 2022

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