, also known as S.-Y. Kuroda, was

Professor Emeritus ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retirement, retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". ...

and Research Professor of

Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

. Although a pioneer in the application of Chomskyan

generative syntax Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...

to the

Japanese language is the principal language of the Japonic languages, Japonic language family spoken by the Japanese people. It has around 123 million speakers, primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language, and within the Japanese dia ...

, he is known for the broad range of his work across the language sciences. For instance, in

formal language theory In logic, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics, a formal language is a set of string (computer science), strings whose symbols are taken from a set called "#Definition, alphabet". The alphabet of a formal language consists of symbol ...

, the

Kuroda normal form In formal language theory, a noncontracting grammar is in Kuroda normal form if all production rules are of the form: :''AB'' → ''CD'' or :''A'' → ''BC'' or :''A'' → ''B'' or :''A'' → ''a'' where A, B, C and D are nonterminal symbols and ...

for

context-sensitive grammar A context-sensitive grammar (CSG) is a formal grammar in which the left-hand sides and right-hand sides of any Production (computer science), production rules may be surrounded by a context of terminal symbol, terminal and nonterminal symbols. Cont ...

s bears his name.

Early life and career

Kuroda was born into a prominent family of

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

s in

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

. His grandfather,

Teiji Takagi Teiji Takagi (高木貞治 ''Takagi Teiji'', April 21, 1875 – February 28, 1960) was a Japanese mathematician, best known for proving the Takagi existence theorem in class field theory. The Blancmange curve, the graph of a nowhere-differenti ...

, was a student of

David Hilbert David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician and philosopher of mathematics and one of the most influential mathematicians of his time. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental idea ...

. Kuroda himself received degrees in mathematics and linguistics from the

University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

. In 1962, he entered

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

with the first graduating class from the new Department of Linguistics, where he wrote his seminal dissertation, ''Generative Studies in the Japanese Language'' (1965), under Chomsky's supervision.

Important publications

* "Classes of languages and linear-bounded automata",

Information and Control ''Information and Computation'' is a closed-access computer science journal published by Elsevier (formerly Academic Press). The journal was founded in 1957 under its former name ''Information and Control'' and given its current title in 1987. , t ...

, 7(2): 207–223, June 1964. * "Whether We Agree or Not : A Comparative Syntax of English and Japanese", in: William J. Poser (ed.) Papers from the Second International Workshop on Japanese Syntax, 103–142. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1988. * ''Toward a poetic theory of narration. Essays of S.-Y. Kuroda'', edited by Sylvie Patron
Table of Contents
de Gruyter Mouton, Berlin 2014, ,

Legacy

In 2013, the Association for Mathematics of Language, an affiliate of the

Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proce ...

, established the S.-Y. Kuroda Prize to honor "work that has spawned a broad area of research" within

mathematical linguistics Mathematical linguistics is the application of mathematics to model phenomena and solve problems in general linguistics and theoretical linguistics. Mathematical linguistics has a significant amount of overlap with computational linguistic ...

. The prize has been awarded at most biennially. In 2017, the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

established a fellowship in his honor. It provides funding to Japanese students to attend the Linguistic Society's biennial summer institute.

References

UCSD Obituary
*

External links

''Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese language''
(his doctoral dissertation from 1965) 1934 births 2009 deaths Linguists from Japan University of Tokyo alumni MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni University of California, San Diego faculty 20th-century American linguists People from Tokyo Japanese emigrants to the United States Linguists of Japanese {{japan-linguist-stub