Chair no. 6 - Tomas Riad

 

Linguist.
Elected: 2011.

In his research, Tomas Riad has delved into the key role played by the stress system in Swedish morphology and developed pedagogical tools for language learning. 

Born in Uppsala in 1959, Tomas Riad lived periodically in Cairo and Alexandria in his father’s homeland of Egypt until the age of five, when the family returned to Uppsala. In 1978, he was admitted to the London Royal College of Music to study violin, where he remained for a year. His interest in music was again reflected upon his being accepted, a few years later, into the prestigious Uppsala choir Orphei Drängar. After completing his military service and undergraduate studies at Uppsala University, he pursued his doctorate at Stockholm University. In 1992, he defended his thesis entitled Structures in Germanic Prosody – A Diachronic Study with Special Reference to the Nordic Languages. In this work, he examined the question of how the Germanic languages ​​could have undergone such similar historical language changes in their sound systems despite not having had continuous contact. He asks whether languages ​​can be seen as ‘predestined’ to develop in a certain general direction and if so, how this may be explained.

Riad’s main research interests include phonology, prosody, poetic metre, language history and morphology. Following his doctoral defence, he spent a period at Stanford University in the USA, where he met his colleague Chris Golston, with whom he began a lasting collaboration. Together and separately, they have authored a large number of research articles on the relationship between prosody and poetic metre in a number of languages, including Classical Greek, Classical Arabic, Old and Middle English, Swedish and the Berber tongue. Riad has also been a visiting researcher at Vilnius University, the Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis and the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Riad is today considered a world-leading authority in his particular field of research. In his book The Phonology of Swedish (2014), he describes the phonological structure of the Swedish language, discussing everything from segmental structure (vowels and consonants) to quantity, stress and intonation. His most important and groundbreaking research results include insights into how – in Swedish and therefore presumably also in the other Germanic languages – the stress system largely determines morphology (word formation and inflection). The tonal accents typically found in Swedish also provide clues to the way the language combines different kinds of morphemes. These findings are collected in his study Prosodin i svenskans morfologi (The Prosody in Swedish Morphology, 2015). Recently, his hypotheses regarding the stress system have been tested in studies of how the brain processes linguistic structure, with promising results.

Tomas Riad is highly active in issues relating to pedagogy and language learning, and has, for example, played a central role in the educational project Intensivutbildning i svenska för nyanlända skolelever (Intensive Education in Swedish for Newly Arrived Schoolchildren).

Tomas Riad was elected to the Swedish Academy in 2011, succeeding Birgitta Trotzig on chair number 6.