Junko Itō (born 1954) is a Japanese-born American linguist. She is emerita research

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

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, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of C ...

. She is the daughter of mathematician

Kiyoshi Itō Kiyoshi, (きよし or キヨシ), is a Japanese given name, also spelled Kyoshi. Possible meanings *''Kyōshi'', a form of Japanese poetry *Kyōshi, a Japanese honorific Written forms *清, "cleanse" *淳, "pure" *潔, "undefiled" *清志, " ...

Education and research

Itō received her Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1986 from the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) is a public land-grant research university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system and was founded in 1863 as the ...

under the supervision of

Alan Prince Alan Sanford Prince (born 1946) is a Board of Governors Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Prince, along with Paul Smolensky, developed Optimality Theory, which was originally applied to phonology, but has be ...

. She joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1987 and remained there until her retirement in 2021. She served as chair of the department from 1999-2006. Itō's research focuses on

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

and

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines *Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts *Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...

. She is primarily known for her work on

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

structure within an optimality theoretic framework. Her influential work has addressed a number of issues in the phonology of 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 ...

, including the

rendaku is a pronunciation change seen in some compound words in Japanese. When rendaku occurs, a voiceless consonant (such as ) is replaced with a voiced consonant (such as ) at the start of the second (or later) part of the compound. For example, t ...

phenomenon. Her work has been published in

Linguistic Inquiry ''Linguistic Inquiry'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal in generative linguistics published by the MIT Press The MIT Press is the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private research university in Cambri ...

amongst other

peer-review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work ( peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

ed research journals in linguistics. Itō often collaborated with her UCSC colleague and husband Armin Mester. From 2018 - 2020 they led an

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party * National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political g ...

grant investigating ''Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory''.

Honors

From 2007-2012, Itō was a co-editor of

Natural Language and Linguistic Theory ''Natural Language & Linguistic Theory'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering theoretical and generative linguistics. It was established in 1983 and originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Since 2004 the journal is pub ...

. A

Festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...

in the honor of Junko Itō & Armin Mester, ''Hana-bana'', was published by UC-Santa Cruz in 2018.

Selected publications

2015 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Sino-Japanese Phonology. Chapter 7 of Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology. ed. by H. Kubozono. pp. 289–312. 2015 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Word Formation and Phonological Processes. Chapter 9 of Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology. ed. by H. Kubozono. pp. 363–395. 2012 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Recursive prosodic phrasing in Japanese. In: Borowsky, Toni, Shigeto Kawahara, Mariko Sugahara, and Takahito Shinya, eds. 2012. Prosody Matters. Essays in Honor of

Elisabeth Selkirk Elisabeth O. Selkirk (born 1945) is a theoretical linguist specializing in phonological theory and the syntax-phonology interface. She is currently a professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. S ...

. Advances in Optimality Theory Series. Elsevier. 280-303. 2009 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. The extended prosodic word. In Kabak, Baris, and Janet Grijzenhout, eds. Phonological Domains: Universals and Derivations. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton de Gruyter. 135-194. 2009 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Lexical classes in phonology. In Miyagawa, Shigeru, and Mamoru Saito, eds. Handbook of Japanese Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 84-106. 2003 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. ''Japanese Morphophonemics: Markedness and Word Structure''. MIT Press Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Series 41. Cambridge, Mass. 2003 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Weak Layering and Word Binarity. In Honma, Takeru, Masao Okazaki, Toshiyuki Tabata and Shin-ichi Tanaka, eds. A New Century of Phonology and Phonological Theory. A Festschrift for Professor Shosuke Haraguchi on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday. 26-65. 1999 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. The structure of the phonological lexicon. In Tsujimura, Natsuko, ed. The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics. Malden, MA, and Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers. 62-100. 1999 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Realignment. In R. Kager, H. v.d. Hulst, and W.Zonneveld, eds. The Prosody-Morphology Interface. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 188-217. 1997 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Sympathy Theory and German truncations. In Miglio, Viola, and Bruce Morén, eds., University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 5. Selected phonology papers from Hopkins Optimality Theory Workshop 1997/University of Maryland Mayfest 1997. 117-139. Also in: On'in kenkyuu honological Studies ed. by the Phonological Society of Japan. Kaitakusha, Tokyo. 1998. 51-66. 1996 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Stem and word in Sino-Japanese. In Otake, Takashi, and Ann Cutler, eds. Phonological Structure and Language Processing: Cross-Linguistic Studies, Speech Research Series. Vol. 12. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.13-44. 1995 Ito, Junko, Armin Mester, and Jaye Padgett. Licensing and redundancy: underspecification in Optimality Theory. Linguistic Inquiry 26. 571-614. 1995 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Japanese phonology. In Goldsmith, John, ed.,The Handbook of Phonological Theory. Blackwell. 817-838. 1993 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Licensed segments and safe paths. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 38. 197-213. 1990 Ito, Junko. Prosodic Minimality in Japanese, CLS 26-II: Papers from the Parasession on the Syllable in Phonetics and Phonology, 213-239. 1989 Ito, Junko. A Prosodic Theory of Epenthesis, Natural Language and Linguistics Theory 7, 217-260. 1988 Ito, Junko. ''Syllable Theory in Prosodic Phonology'', Garland Publishing, New York.

External links

Video: Junko Ito, Armin Mester (UC Santa Cruz), 2013: ''Supersized Units'': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duYc4W4Lhp4

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ito, Junko American women linguists Japanese emigrants to the United States Phonologists from the United States Living people University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts alumni American academics of Japanese descent Linguists of Japanese 1954 births Linguistics journal editors