ooks in the 1950s. We look forward to the results <strong>of</strong> this research as much as we have enjoyed her past work, and hope she will long continue to be active not only intellectually, but as a faithful listener to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Queen’s Hall concerts and physically, as a keen hill walker.
Special Minute Pr<strong>of</strong>essor D. Robert Ladd A.B., M.A., Ph.D. Bob Ladd joined the lecturing staff <strong>of</strong> the Department <strong>of</strong> Linguistics in <strong>January</strong> 1985, and formally retired from his Chair in Linguistics in the School <strong>of</strong> Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the end <strong>of</strong> July 2011. He was educated at the Phillips Exeter Academy, founded in 1781 in Exeter, New Hampshire, and at Brown <strong>University</strong>, where he graduated in 1968 magna cum laude with highest honours in linguistics. After two years <strong>of</strong> army service, he began postgraduate study at Cornell <strong>University</strong>, receiving his M.A. in 1972. He then worked as a Lektor in English and linguistics at the <strong>University</strong> <strong>of</strong> Heidelberg, before returning to Cornell to undertake doctoral work on the ‘meaning’ <strong>of</strong> intonation and prosody – the grammatical and discourselevel factors that influence accent placement and tune choice. After receiving the Ph.D. in 1978, he left to spend a year as a Fulbright lecturer at the <strong>University</strong> <strong>of</strong> Cluj, Romania. That same year he published his first article, in Language, the journal which then as now was reckoned to be the most important and prestigious in the field. As it happens, the last article he published prior to his retirement was in the same journal. <strong>The</strong> first half <strong>of</strong> the 1980s saw Bob focus his research activity on phonology, in particular on the evidence for the existence <strong>of</strong> localised pitch targets in intonation, on the question <strong>of</strong> how such targets are scaled relative to the speaker’s voice range, and on the temporal coordination <strong>of</strong> such targets with the segmental string. This work was conducted at universities on both sides <strong>of</strong> the Atlantic, before he finally settled into a post at the <strong>University</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Edinburgh</strong>, his home for the remaining quartercentury <strong>of</strong> his <strong>of</strong>ficial career. On arriving in <strong>Edinburgh</strong>, one <strong>of</strong> Bob’s major projects was to apply the theoretical work he had been doing to problems <strong>of</strong> intonation in synthetic speech, in collaboration with others at the Centre for Speech Technology Research. He produced a model for synthesising naturalsounding pitch contours from simple linguistic specifications. In 1989 he was promoted to Reader in recognition <strong>of</strong> his research achievements, and in 1997 he was awarded a personal chair, following the publication <strong>of</strong> his book Intonational Phonology by Cambridge <strong>University</strong> Press in 1996, and his appointment as CoEditor (with Ellen Gurman Bard) <strong>of</strong> the journal Language and Speech, a responsibility he held through 2000. Bob has been principal investigator or coinvestigator on successful applications to research councils totalling approximately £1 million. He served as Head <strong>of</strong> the Department <strong>of</strong> <strong>The</strong>oretical and Applied Linguistics from 2000 to 2003, the period in which the <strong>University</strong> was restructured. Bob took a central role in the creation <strong>of</strong> the School <strong>of</strong> Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, and later, from 2008 until 2010, served as Acting Head <strong>of</strong> the School. As one <strong>of</strong> the most respected and influential figures in the study <strong>of</strong> intonation and prosody <strong>of</strong> his generation, Bob has been called upon countless times to serve as external examiner <strong>of</strong> theses, to referee publications and to give specialist seminars across the UK, Europe, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Asia. His linguistic interests too are global, and a 2007 paper entitled “Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency <strong>of</strong> the adaptive haplogroups <strong>of</strong> two brain size genes” (coauthored with Dan Dediu) received worldwide press coverage for its controversial finding that speakers <strong>of</strong> tone languages <strong>of</strong> Africa and Asia that were never previously thought to be historically related share a distinctive genetic trait.
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