Richard Ogden
Professor

Profile

Biography

Richard Ogden is a phonetician and conversation analyst. He has worked on data in English, Finnish and British Sign Language, among others. His 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. He is the author of An Introduction to English Phonetics (EUP). He frequently teaches short courses at York and abroad. He is on the Editorial Board of the journals Phonetic and Interactional Linguistics. 

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 - )
  Associate Dean for Research (2019 - 2024)
  Director, Humanities Research Centre (2019 - 2024)

Research

Overview

I'm interested in a range of issues around naturally-occurring talk, ranging from segmental phonetic details to the co-ordination of speech with non-speech physical actions such as gesture. I'm also happy to work on languages other than English; I am reasonably fluent in Swedish, Finnish, German, and French and have worked on other languages too. 

I'm interested in language as a social phenomenon and as a resource for doing things: previous work focuses on complaints, requests and assessments, as well as turn-taking and indexing certain kinds of stance. My recent work looks at non-lexical vocalisations like clicks, swallows and laughter: how are they organised? How do people in conversation make sense of them? In what respects are they like the sounds of language? What does this organisation tell us about language more generally?

Research group(s)

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

Available PhD research projects

I am interested in supervising projects that combine conversation analysis with phonetics, and multimodal interaction.

External activities

Memberships

• Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Communication (University of York)
  Member
• British Association of Academic Phoneticians
  Member
• International Phonetic Association
  Member
• International Society for Conversation Analysis
  Member
• Kotikielen Seura
  Member
• Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura
  Member
• Philological Society
  Member