Gösta Bruce 1947-2010
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I just learned that Gösta Bruce died last week.
His 1977 dissertation Swedish Word Accents in Sentence Perspective was one of those works that seems to open up a whole new intellectual continent for exploration — when I first read it, I immediately felt that "it smells of horizons", as my grandfather used to say.
I'm sorry to say that very few of Gösta's publications seem to be openly available on line. If your local library has a subscription, you may be able to read e.g. Gösta Bruce and Paul Touati, "On the analysis of prosody in spontaneous speech with exemplification from Swedish and French", Speech Communication 1992; or Gösta Bruce, "Components of a prosodic typology of Swedish intonation", in Riad and Gussenhoven (Eds.), Tones and Tunes: Typological Studies in Word and Sentence Prosody (v. 1), 2007.
John Wells has a few details about Gösta's passing.
Bob Ladd said,
June 21, 2010 @ 5:53 pm
I was invited to give a talk at a symposium in honour of Gösta's 60th birthday, organised by his colleagues in Lund in 2007. I presented an appreciation of his work – my own take on why his thesis "smelled of horizons". I really thought he and I would have many more years to explore those horizons, and it's hard to accept that he's gone. As a small homage to Gösta, I've posted the text of that talk here.
Mary Beckman said,
October 29, 2010 @ 3:14 am
The ppt for Bob's talk, which is posted on the symposium site has a very nice dynamic illustration of the "why" that Bob talks about. There is a list of publications with pdf files for some of the papers at Gösta's page at Lund University. What is not conveyed adequately in any of these publications is Gösta's wry humor and quiet generosity, which did as much to advance the field as his intelligence, imagination, and intellectual integrity.
Mary Beckman said,
October 29, 2010 @ 3:22 am
Here is the corrected link to the symposium site:
http://conference2.sol.lu.se/waatisp/
Kim Silverman said,
March 29, 2012 @ 7:03 pm
I just stumbled upon this page. Gösta's work was what really caused me to understand the existence and phonology of pitch accents, the difference between association and alignment, and is the basis of the pitch alignment approach I first wrote into the AT&T speech synthesizer and then the rather rich alignment rules in the pitch model of the text-to-speech synthesis in the Alex voice (and all other Macintalk voices) in Mac OS X.
I always enjoyed Gösta's company, particularly his gentle, kind, and humble way of asking deep probing questions about shortcomings in my work, things that I had not noticed by that he did.