, aka S.-Y. Kuroda, was

Professor Emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

and Research Professor of

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 ...

at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

. Although a pioneer in the application of Chomskyan

generative syntax Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...

to 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 ma ...

, 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 consists of words whose letters are taken from an alphabet and are well-formed according to a specific set of rules. The alphabet of a formal language consists of symb ...

, the

Kuroda normal form In formal language theory, a context-sensitive 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 an ...

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 rules may be surrounded by a context of terminal and nonterminal symbols. Context-sensitive grammars are more general than co ...

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, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

s in

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 ...

. 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-differentiabl ...

, was a student of

David Hilbert David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many a ...

. Kuroda himself received degrees in mathematics and linguistics from the

University of Tokyo , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project by ...

. In 1962, he entered

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

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 proces ...

, established the S.-Y. Kuroda Prize to honor "work that has spawned a broad area of research" within mathematical linguistics. 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 the United States Linguists from Japan University of Tokyo alumni MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni University of California, San Diego faculty 20th-century linguists People from Tokyo Japanese emigrants to the United States Linguists of Japanese {{japan-linguist-stub