I am a first year Ph.D. student in linguistics at the University of California Los Angeles. My primary interest is phonology and its interface with phonetics. I am also interested in the morpho-syntactic structures of Japanese. For more specific information about my research, please see here.
I finished my MA in linguistics at Sophia University, Tokyo, on March 2011. While at Sophia, I was a member of the Sophia University Phonetics Laboratory.
My first name is quite simple: "Yu".
In English, it is pronounced
the same way as "you", the second person pronoun.
(So you don't really have to remember my name.
You can just say "Hey, you!")
Its possible Japanese pronounciations
are [jɯː], [jiɯ]
or [jiː]. The Japanese high
back vowel is usually realized as
a (centralized) unrounded high back vowel [ɯ].
It becomes fronted when it is adjacent to
a coronal or palatal sound.
Thus, /juː/ can be realized
as the above possibilities.
My last name, Tanaka, is one of the most
typical Japanese family names,
which is pronounced [tanaka] or [t̪an̪aka].
I speak Japanese (native), English and French. One of my non-academic interests is "travelling" (please see Gallery).
For a bit more information about me, please see my CV [pdf].
