A la suite de l'allocution de Louis Pools, Mario Rossi a tenu la conférence inaugurale:"Is syntactic structure prosodicaly recoverable ?''

ESCA-MEDAL AWARD

Address by the ESCA President, Prof. Louis Pols

Distinguished prof. Rossi, cher ami Mario,

Every two years the whole international speech community gets together for this Eurospeech conference, to discuss new developments in Speech Communication Science and Technology and to meet colleagues and friends. On that occasion we also get together to honor one of our most distinguished colleagues with the ESCA medal. Since 1989 in Paris the medal was presented to Gunnar Fant, Jim Flanagan, Adrian Fourcin, and Ken Stevens, respectively. I hope that you Mario will consider it a privilege to be the fifth in this impressive row of names, and the first european. We know that you very much deserve this election, but it might not hurt for the big audience gathered in this hall, to give some firther justification.

First of all you are a nice guy ! In this present-day competitive society this is most valuable property. It also allows you to get things done, like running a big Phonetics laboratory for many years in Aix-en-Provence, or organizing with all your colleagues the twelfth International Congress of Phonetic Science in August 1991 as its president in your beautiful home town Aix.

You are also very much a French European and world citizen. You have an open mind to international developments but will never forget to be an Italian-born frenchman first of all. Contrary to what people might believe, I consider this to be a highly favorable attitude : never forget your roots, but keep an open eye to developments elsewhere. You spent several months in the United States, and from that time on you don't mind speaking English any more, although you still prefer other languages like French and Italian.

Most of all you are a productive and open-minded scientist. I hope and expect that your forthcoming lecture, entitled ''Is syntactic structure prosodicaly recoverable ?'', will be another proof for that. Your interest and expertise covers such diverse fields as roman diactology, phonology, speech perception, prosody, speech synthesis and recognition plus, since your retirement, French slips of tongue. A peculiar in your linguistic interests, is your enthusiasm for the Etrurian alphabet, and for the Rossano language that you studied and described in your thesis at the Sorbonne University in Paris. What else would one desire for a first plenary keynote speaker at this conference.

As an emiritus professor since 1993, you are still amazingly active. Being relieved now from the administrative duties, you are devoted more than ever to research in a passionate way. I learned from one of your colleagues that you spent this month of August camping in the Alp mountains with 3 of your grandchildren, including wild water rafting on a river. He is truly a hyper active grandfather ! Actually you also gave a keynote address at the ESCA Workshop on ''Intonation : Past, Present, and Future'' last week in Athens. I hope that I am not misrepresenting your other fields of interest, by indicating that prosody has stolen your heart. Not so much prosody as an isolated discipline, but prosody as an indispensable element of spoken language communication, both between humans and between human and machine. The paper ''A principle-based model for predicting the prosody of speech'' that you wrote in the book ''Leveles in Speech Communication : Relations and Interactions'', in commemoration to your long-time companion and friend Max Wajskop, is probably a good example of that.

Talking about the late Max Wajskop, he and you were instrumental in setting up, together with René Carré, the Speech Group within the French Acoustical Society GALF (Groupement des Acousticiens de Langue Française). For many years this group has been organizing the highly succesful JEPs, the yearly ''Journées d'études sur la parole'', taking place all over the (French-speaking) world.

You became a professor in Aix in 1975. You have always been very active within the French scientific research organization CNRS, first as a researcher, but also in various commitees, and of course as the director of the CNRS laboratory ''Parole et Langage'' in Aix for many years. In the 60's you worked for a while at the Phonetic Institute in Grenoble, headed by prof. Gsell. I was told that you quickly took over from him the exclusive right to use the very first Sonagraph and you then became an expert in sonagram reading. You also acquainted yourself very quicly to new computer developments wich required to write your own programs in that ugly assembler language. For more than 20 years you were, and actually still are, the president of the scientific comittee of the Padova ''Centro di Fonetica'', and you were able to shake Italian bureaucracy a bit whenever necessary.

I started to know you better since the days of the Esprit-SAM project from 1989 onwards, when your laboratory became actively involved in the synthesis evaluation group that I coordinated. Our group met several times in Aix, and we liked those meetings so much that we came together one last time in Aix in 1993, where after the final review meeting had taken place. You are very well known as a most generous host, and we had the most fantastic dinners several of the finest restaurants in Aix, and I heard similar stories from several other projects, like ACCOR. However, my most impressive dinner of all was at your home, when your wife Margherita offered us delicious Provence dishes, while you were explaining to us the delicacies of the subsequent wines that you were serving. You deserve the title of an epicurean (somebody devoted to the sensual pleasures of food and drink), you are a true lover of oenology (the study of wine), and you have a sure taste for a choice of the best wines, and your wine cellar is famous. On that specific SAM dinner you took us back in 10-year steps, and the wines got more and more extravagant.

Everybody who participated in the Phonetics Congress in 1991 will certainly also remember this great hospitality, not just of Mario Rossi himself, but also of his whole organizing comittee, and of the city of Aix. This city was a real temptation to all congress participants, because of it's many nights attractions and because of the fantastic weather.

Here in Rhodes we are again in a very hospitable and sunny place for another exciting conference. So this may indeed be the appropriate place and time to honor you and offer you our precious ESCA medal, simple because ''Mario is the best''. Grazie, Merci !