Peter Ladefoged and phonetics in the field

Abstract

Among many distinctive contributions to phonetics by Peter Ladefoged is an insistence on the immense diversity of phonetic phenomena in the languages of the world, particularly at the segmental level. Because of this Peter has maintained a flexible approach to any scheme of classification or description, adapting to both new approaches and new data. Perhaps more than any other phonetician he has expected to find surprises, and has gone to far corners of the world in search of them. His ground-breaking Phonetic Study of West African Languages from 1964 laid out a template for synthesizing a large mass of data which is echoed in later works such as Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonetics and Sounds of the World’s Languages. His widely used Course in Phonetics and other textbooks have shown generations of students the richness of spoken sound. But not only novel research results have marked Peter’s contributions to this aspect of phonetics; equally significant are his methodological innovations in taking experimental techniques to the field. Some of the most salient steps along both these paths will be reviewed from personal and professional perspectives.