Noriko M. Akatsuka (March 17, 1937 – October 17, 2016) was a

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

ese-born American scholar of

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 ma ...

and Japanese, Korean and English

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. Linguis ...

, particularly known for her research on

conditionals Conditional (if then) may refer to: *Causal conditional, if X then Y, where X is a cause of Y *Conditional probability, the probability of an event A given that another event B has occurred *Conditional proof, in logic: a proof that asserts a co ...

and

epistemic modality Epistemic modality is a sub-type of linguistic modality that encompasses knowledge, belief, or credence in a proposition. Epistemic modality is exemplified by the English modals ''may'', ''might'', ''must''. However, it occurs cross-linguisticall ...

.Strauss, Susan (2017). In Memoriam Noriko M. Akatsuka. ''Linguistics'' 55: 251–252. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2017-5002Strauss, Susan, Shoichi Iwasaki (2016). In Memoriam. ''The Korean Language in America'' 20: 101–103.

Early life and education

She was born in 1937 in

Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ci ...

, Japan, to Chikara and Shizuko Shiga, who died when she was a child, leaving her to be raised by her grandmother and then adopted by Takashi and Kayoko Akatsuka. She was educated at Rakuhoku High School and then studied English literature at Doshisha University (1955–59). She moved to the U.S. in the 1960s for her post-graduate education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, receiving her PhD in linguistics in 1972.Mayes, Patricia (1994)
Conditionals and the Logic of Desirability: An Interview with Noriko Akatsuka
''Issues in Applied Linguistics'' 5:

Career and research

Akatsuka taught at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

before moving to the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

(UCLA) in 1981, where she laid the foundations for the Asian linguistics graduate program of the Department for Asian Languages and Cultures and also developed the existing Japanese-language undergraduate teaching.In memoriam: Noriko Akatsuka laid groundwork for Asian linguistics program at UCLA
UCLA, March 21, 2017 (accessed 6 December 2021) Her research in the early 1970s included work on

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

in Japanese, including reflexivization and passives;Naomi Hanaoka McGloin (2018)
Honoring Noriko Akatsuka and her scholarly contributions
(abstract), Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference 26 (accessed 12 December 2021) it was still being cited at the time of her death. Her 1977 paper "What is the 'emphatic root transformation' phenomenon?" discusses inverted constructions in English, and is an early example of her focus on the critical importance of the speaker. According to Naomi Hanaoka McGloin, the background to all of Akatsuka's work is "a quest for an answer to a basic question, 'What makes language human?'" From the mid-1970s, her research focused on the use of

in Japanese, Korean and English. According to Patricia Mayes, Akatsuka's work shows that "conditionals do not convey static, objective generalizations about the world; rather, they express the speaker's dynamic, subjective evaluation of what s/he knows about the world and how s/he feels about it, given the situation and context at the time of speaking." Susan Strauss writes in an obituary that the areas of conditionals and

are "nearly synonymous" with Akatsuka, "most notably the terms the epistemic scale and the desirability hypothesis". Akatsuka learned Korean as an adult in the US and became interested in comparisons between Korean, Japanese and English in the 1990s, in collaboration with Sung-Ock Sohn, Patricia Clancy and Strauss. Akatsuka was consulting editor for ''

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. Linguis ...

'' for nearly two decades. She published a book, ''Modaritii to hatsuwakooi'' (''Modality and Speech Acts'') in 1998. With Clancy, Hajime Hoji and Hyo-Sang Lee, she founded the Japanese and Korean Linguistics Circle in the mid-1980s. Akatsuka organised the first Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference at UCLA in 1990. She arranged for the proceedings of the ongoing conference series to be published by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, and was editor or co-editor of four volumes. Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Japanese/Korean Linguistics
' (accessed 12 December 2021) ''Aspects of Linguistics: In Honor of Noriko Akatsuka'' was published in 2007.

Personal life

Akatsuka met the linguist

James D. McCawley James David McCawley (March 30, 1938 – April 10, 1999) was a Scottish-American linguist. Biography McCawley was born James Quillan McCawley, Jr. to Dr. Monica Bateman McCawley (b. 1901), a physician and surgeon, and James Quillan McCawley (b. ...

in 1971, while a post-doctoral student, and they married on December 16 of that year. They divorced in December 1978. Akatsuka died on October 17, 2016, in

Santa Monica, California Santa Monica (; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Santa Mónica'') is a city in Los Angeles County, California, Los Angeles County, situated along Santa Monica Bay on California's South Coast (California), South Coast. Santa Monica's 2020 United Sta ...

. A celebration of her contributions was organized at the Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference in 2017.

Publications

Edited books *Noriko Akatsuka, Susan Strauss, Bernard Comrie (eds). ''Japanese/Korean Linguistics'', Vol. 10 *Noriko Akatsuka, Hajime Hoji, Shoichi Iwasaki, Sung-Ock Sohn, Susan Strauss (eds). ''Japanese/Korean Linguistics'', Vol. 7 *Noriko Akatsuka, Shoichi Iwasaki, Susan Strauss (eds). ''Japanese/Korean Linguistics'', Vol. 5 *Noriko Akatsuka (ed.). ''Japanese/Korean Linguistics'', Vol. 4 Research papers *Noriko Akatsuka (1985). Conditionals and the epistemic scale. ''Language'' 61: 625–639 (Akatsuka's most highly cited research paper, with 334 citations according to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

Google Scholar search for "Noriko Akatsuka"
(accessed 12 December 2021))

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Akatsuka, Noriko 1937 births 2016 deaths People from Kyoto Doshisha University alumni University of Chicago faculty University of California, Los Angeles faculty Linguists from Japan Linguists of Japanese Linguists of Korean Women linguists 20th-century linguists 21st-century linguists University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts and Sciences alumni