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

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

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...

at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the edge ...

, where she served as chair of the department from 1999-2006. Itō received her Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1986 from the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

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 bee ...

. Itō's research focuses on

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

and morphology. She is primarily known for her work on syllable structure within an optimality theoretic framework. Her work has addressed the phonology of the

Japanese language is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been ...

, including the

rendaku is a phenomenon in Japanese morphophonology that governs the voicing of the initial consonant of a non-initial portion of a compound or prefixed word. In modern Japanese, ''rendaku'' is common but at times unpredictable, with certain words u ...

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 since 1970. Ever since its foundation, it has been edited by Samuel Jay Keyser Samuel Jay Keyser (born 7 July 1935) is an American ...

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. She often collaborates with her UCSC colleague and husband Armin Mester. 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 ...

in their honor, ''Hana-bana'', was published by UC-Santa Cruz in 2018. 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 Possible writings *清, "cleanse" *淳, "pure" *潔, "undefiled" *清志, " ...

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. 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 Linguists from the United States Women linguists Japanese emigrants to the United States Phonologists Living people University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts alumni American academics of Japanese descent Linguists of Japanese 1954 births