Assistant Professor of Japanese
Ph.d. in linguistics (Harvard University 1993)
I started teaching Japanese at Lehigh in 1994. Besides the language
courses, I offer a course about the Japanese language "The Japanese
Language: Past and Present" and a linguistic course "Introduction to
Descriptive Linguistics." I am also a faculty advisor to the two
students clubs: "Japanese Anime club: EKI" and "Japan Society". If you
are interested in the activities of these clubs, please ask me about it.
My research interest is "Information Theory" of language. It is a study
of how native speakers of any language package information in their
speech. I am currently concentrating on the particles (case-markers) of
the Japanese language. My recent publications are: "Crossing uchi/soto
boundary: the case of te-kuru in Japanese," in the Journal of
Association of Teachers of Japanese (2000), and "The nominative
case-marker deletion in Japanese: an analysis from the perspective of
Information Structure", in the Journal of Pragmatics (forthcoming).
I love interacting with students. That's how I think I stay young! So
please come to my office for a good chat when you have time.