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)

• Phonetics and phonology
• Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Communication

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.