Professor Bob Ladd (FBA)
Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus
- Linguistics and English Language
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
- Email: bob.ladd@ed.ac.uk
Availability
I normally work at home. Email is unquestionably the most reliable way to contact me.
Background
I have been in Edinburgh since the beginning of 1985. Between the time I finished my PhD at Cornell in 1978 and the time I came to Edinburgh I had a series of one- and two-year jobs in various places in the US and Europe. Since coming to Edinburgh I have also taught at various summer schools and institutes (notably ESSLLI 5 in Lisbon in 1993, the LSA Institute at Cornell in 1997, and the 10th ABRALIN summer school in Niterói, Brazil in 2017), and have had visiting affiliations with the Institute for Perception Research (IPO) in Eindhoven (1994), the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (1995), the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins (2000), and the Department of Comparative Linguistics at the University of Zurich (2014). I was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in July 2015 and a Member of the Academia Europaea in 2016.
CV
159118.pdf
Responsibilities & affiliations
I officially retired from my University position in July 2011. I remain involved with research and with my colleagues in the department. However, I am no longer involved in classroom teaching, and it is no longer possible for me to accept new PhD students.
Between 2000 and 2010 I was heavily involved in administrative work. I was Head of the former Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from 2000-2003. The University's restructuring in 2002 meant that from mid-2001 I got caught up in creating and then running the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences (PPLS). I was convener of the PPLS Undergraduate Studies Committee from 2004 to 2006, and from 2008 to 2010 I was Acting Head of School.
An important part of my professional life is devoted to editorial work. I was Co-Editor of Language and Speech from 1994-2000 and I have been an Associate Editor of Phonology since 1995. I am also on the editorial boards of Linguistics and Journal of Phonetics, and I review papers for a wide range of other journals as well.
From 2010-2014 I served as the first President of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. From 2006-2013 I was a member of the Fachbeirat (Scientific Advisory Council) of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. In 2014 and 2015 I was an active member of the Scottish local organising committee of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, which was held in Glasgow in August 2015.
Undergraduate teaching
During more than 26 years as a full member of staff here, I taught phonetics and phonology at various levels and played a major role in undergraduate curriculum development in Linguistics generally. People I taught here as undergraduates include April McMahon, Edward Flemming, Dominic Watt, Elizabeth Wonnacott, Peter Graff, and Rory Turnbull.
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
No
Past PhD students supervised
During my time as a full-time member of staff I I supervised about 30 PhD students working on a variety of phonetic, phonological, and prosodic topics, and contributed to our active Phonetics and Phonology Research Group. My past PhD students include Haruo Kubozono, Jim Scobbie, Jo Verhoeven, Alexandra Vella, Ivan Yuen, Ineke Mennen, Sasha Calhoun, and Mirella Blum.
Research summary
Much of my research has dealt with intonation and prosody, with excursions into tone languages, language and music, and interactions between pitch and segmentals. I have also long been interested in the relation between phonological abstractions and phonetic data, and in experimental approaches to such questions ("Laboratory Phonology").