Profile
Biography
Richard Ogden is a phonetician with a wide range of other interests, including Finnish, British Sign Language, phonology (especially Firthian phonology), and Conversation Analysis. His recent work combines phonetic detail (that is, the way the sounds of speech are organised) with conversation analytic methodology, as a way of working out how people use aspects of speech to perform social actions, such as turn-taking, agreeing, complaining, and telling stories.
Career
- University of Cambridge
BA in Modern and Mediaeval Languages (German, Swedish, linguistics) (1984-87)
MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing (1988 - 1989)
- University of York
DPhil: An exploration of phonetic exponency in Firthian Prosodic Analysis: Form and substance in Finnish phonology (1990 - 1995)
Research associate (1990 - 1994)
Lecturer (1995 - 2003)
Senior lecturer (2003 - 2014)
Reader (2014 - 2018)
Professor (2018 - )
- University of Helsinki
Dosentti (adjunct professor), Department of Phonetics (2008 - )
Research
Overview
- English conversation
- Finnish conversation
- Phonetics and phonology
Most of my current work is on the phonetics of everyday talk. Some of the things I have worked on include:
- Voice quality and turn-taking in Finnish
- Stylised intonation in Finnish
- Ways to do agreement and disagreement
- "Intensifying emphasis" in English
- Offers, requests and complaints as vehicles for affiliation and disaffiliation in English
- Clicks in English
I'm not just interested in the phonetics of these phenomena. I'm interested more specifically in how we structure social actions through sequences of talk. Often, speakers use phonetic resources alongside others, such as choice of lexical items, or designing their talk in a specific way relative to someone else's. One of the challenges for phonetics and phonology, I think, lies in working out how these different design features interact.
Projects
- Sound to Sense
2S is an interdisciplinary EC-funded Marie Curie Research Training Network (MC-RTN) involving engineers, computer scientists, psychologists, and linguistic phoneticians. We use a variety of approaches to investigate what types of information are available in the speech signal, and how listeners use that information when they are listening in their native language, or in a foreign language, or in a noisy place like a railway station, when it is hard to hear the speech. These three types of listening situation allow us to see how listeners actively use their knowledge, together with the speech they hear, to understand a message.
- Extraordinary sounds of English
A project looking at sounds like clicks, ejectives and other non-lexical, non-phonemic sounds of English in conversational data.
Research group(s)
Grants
- Economic and Social Research Council
Affiliation and disaffiliation in interaction: language and social cohesion. ESRC grant 000230035, 1 April 2003-31 March 2006. Part of an ESF initiative. Value £124,796.
- Marie Curie Research Training Network
Sound to Sense. May 2007-May 2011; c. €50,000 at York.
- Innovation and Research Priming Fund
Extraordinary Sounds of English. University of York 2009. Value £3000.
Collaborators
- Paul Drew
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of York
- John Local
Professor, Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York
- Sarah Hawkins
Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge
- Marja-Leena Sorjonen
Professor, Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies, University of Helsinki
- Traci Walker
RCUK fellow, Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York
Available PhD research projects
I am especially interested in supervising projects that combine conversation analysis with phonetics, and the study of gesture with phonetics; and projects which look at the implications of such studies for the language mechanism more generally.
Supervision
- Nora al Zahrani
Aspects of turn-taking in Hijazi Arabic
- Kaj Nyman
Cues to vowels in English plosives
Teaching
Other teaching
Occasional workshops and short courses on the phonetics of conversation:
- Czech Republic, August 2010
- Finland, September 2010
Occasional short courses at Helsinki University in my role as docent.
External activities
Memberships
- Advisory Board of the Centre for Deafness, Cognition and Language (University College, London)
Member
- Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Communication (University of York)
Member
- British Association of Academic Phoneticians
Member
- International Phonetic Association
Member
- Kotikielen Seura
Member
- Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura
Member
- Philological Society
Member
- Sound to Sense
Member, Marie Curie Research Training Network
Editorial duties
- Phonetica
Associate editor
- Virittäjä
Member of the editorial board
- Economic and Social Research Council
Referee
- Arts & Humanities Research Council
Referee
- CNRS (France)
Referee
- GACR (Czech research foundation)
Referee
- Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (2008)
Referee
- National Science Foundation (USA)
Referee
External examining
- University of Essex
Department of Language and Linguistics (2005-2009)
- University of Edinburgh
Department of Linguistics and English Language (2009-present)
Invited talks and conferences
Downloads of many conference papers are available on Richard Ogden's personal website.
- British Association of Academic Phoneticians
2010 Clicks in York English. Poster presented at BAAP, London, March 2010.
- British Association of Academic Phoneticians
2010 Intensifying Emphasis in Conversation. Paper presented at BAAP, London, March 2010.
- New Ways of Analyzing Variation
2009 Introduction to the Phonetics of Conversation. Workshop Best Practices in Sociophonetics, NWAV, Ottawa, October 2009.
- Prosody in Interaction
2008 The wholeness of speech: prosodies in talk. Workshop on Prosody in Interaction, Potsdam, September 2008.