Remembering Gösta Bruce

An international Symposium on Prosody to commemorate the life and work of the late Gösta Bruce (1947-2010) is being held at the Lund University Centre for Language and Literature on 2-3 June, 2014.

The symposium web page is here.

Photo: Daniel Bruce

The first morning:

	Professor Bob Ladd, invited speaker from the University of Edinburgh (UK), explaining “what prosody is anyway”, tracing the shift from poetic metre and poetic well-formedness to its current meaning. Conclusion: everyone knows what prosody is, but no-one can define it.
	Professor Julia Hirschberg, invited speaker from Columbia University (USA) reporting experiments in Mandarin and American English on how speakers adapt (or don’t adapt) aspects of their speaking styles to each other in different cultures.
	Docent Mikael Roll (Lund, student and colleague of Gösta’s) presented neurolinguistic EEG and fMRI data demonstrating how the Swedish word accent tones are used for analysing morphological structure.

The remaining invited speakers are San Duanmo (University of Michigan, Prosody and word length), Caroline Féry (Goethe Univesity, Frankfurt, The disambiguating role of prosody in relative clauses), Nina Grønnum (University of Copenhagen, Danish stød is tone deaf), Carlos Gussenhoven (Radboud University, Languages with and without word stress), Thomas Riad (University of Stockholm, A phonological typology of North German Accent).

In addition, there are 9 talks by Gösta’s colleagues, and posters by guests, colleagues, and students.

In all, there are 35 participants from 10 different countries.

The symposium is sponsored by the Crafoord Foundation, The Swedish Research Council, The Lund Centre for Language and Literature, the University of Lund, and Elizabeth Rausing’s Memorial Fund for Reasearch.

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