About Gösta Bruce

Goesta_1988Gösta Bruce was appointed Professor of Phonetics at Lund University in 1986. He served as the President of the International Phonetic Association from 2007 until his death in June of 2010.

His highly original 1977 thesis on Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective
used a variety of measures from both production and perception experiments to document his insights about Swedish accentuation and intonation. These became a cornerstone of "non-linear" Goesta_1988approaches to understanding the relationships among lexical tones or word accents and intonation in many other languages as well. He also led the way in understanding how such relationships interact with variation across dialects of a language.

In later years, he was the research leader of a series of important projects (ProZoDiag, SweDia2000, SIMULEKT) that also advanced our understanding of the relationships among prosodic phrasing, accentuation, syntactic constituency, and dialogue structure.

The breadth and extent of his influence can be appreciated from the chapters of Prosody: Theory and Experiment, a collection of studies presented to Gösta Bruce on his 50th birthday. (Royalties from this book go to the Gösta Bruce Memorial Fund.) His vast accumulated knowledge of variation across Swedish can be appreciated from his final book, on Vår fonetiska geografi [Our phonetic geography].