Research Professor, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz

I am a linguist with a research focus in phonological theory (study of speech sounds), in particular, as it relates to prosodic structure, lexical accent, and more recently, the syntax-prosody interface. Since my dissertation, which developed a prosodic theory of the syllable (onset/coda restrictions, and prosodic licensing), my work has been concerned with constraint-based phonological theory, specifically with an optimality-theoretic model of phonology. One empirical focus of my research has been the morphophonemics and prosody of Japanese, as it pertains to word structure and its phonological form. A secondary line of investigation concerns the structure of the phonological lexicon and its implications for the theory of grammar. Besides Japanese, languages analyzed in my work include Ancient Greek, Ainu, Danish, English, and German.

For further information, please refer to my recent papers and publications.

Recent NSF-funded Research Project: Syntax-Prosody in Optimality Theory(SPOT) [featured in the Humanities Institute newsletter (Dec. 2018) and in the UCSC Inquiry Magazine (July 2019)]

 
Copyright Junko Ito, 2023