Yoko Sugioka - Retiring in AY2019

For the 34 years since I joined Keio University, I have primarily been in charge of English classes at the Faculty of Economics. When I first arrived, English classes typically had 50 students, and one year, an English composition class had over 60 students, making interactive classes difficult. Later, curriculum reforms reduced the size of language classes, and it was a major step forward when classes of 30 or 20 students became the norm.

Furthermore, after we all considered and discussed the advantages of English as a language students have already studied and the significance of learning it at a university rather than a language school, the "English Seminar" became a pillar of the Faculty of Economics' English curriculum. This seminar focuses on learning about topics related to each instructor's specialty "in English," rather than simply learning the English language itself. Next, "English Study Skills" was added as a required course for first-year students to help them learn more effectively in the English Seminar. This course teaches the skills to summarize English sources in English, and to present and write papers in English on what they have researched and thought about, all without relying on Japanese. The classes are also conducted in English. The teaching materials, collaboratively created by the English department faculty, were published as a textbook by Keio University Press after several years of trial and error, and continue to be revised.

This unique curriculum of the Faculty of Economics, where all 42 first-year classes acquire the skills to learn and communicate using English before freely combining and studying their chosen topics in the English Seminar, will undoubtedly continue to evolve. Being involved in building its foundation is a joyful and meaningful memory for me.

I have also been conducting research in theoretical linguistics as an affiliate researcher at The Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, and have taught classes on word formation and lexical semantics in the special lectures in linguistics at the Faculty of Letters.

What inspired me to pursue linguistics was the shock I felt as a student when I read a passage by Noam Chomsky stating that "the study of language is the study of the human mind." My doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, which examined the relationship between word formation and syntax in the generative grammar model, was published by Garland in New York as a foundational work that broadly covers Japanese word formation. It was reissued this year (2019) by Routledge in London.

Since then, my research has consistently focused on the regularity and irregularity (lexicality) of the word, the basic unit of language. In word formation, where words are created by combining multiple elements, some processes show regularity and productivity essentially no different from syntactic rules, such as forming the noun *takasa* (height) from the adjective *takai* (high) and the suffix *-sa*. On the other hand, there are cases like *takami* (a high place), where the meaning cannot be predicted from a simple combination of its original elements (*takai* + *-mi*), and the entire word is listed in the lexicon. These dynamic and static aspects of word formation are, in fact, an inherent duality of human language, and their theorization has become a point of contention that influences grammatical models.

In the process of exploring this duality of language, I was fortunate to have valuable encounters with Takane Ito (English Linguistics) of The University of Tokyo and Yuko Hagiwara (Neurolinguistics) of Tokyo Metropolitan University (at the time). We developed empirical collaborative research based on the hypothesis that two different mental mechanisms, "memory" and "rules," are involved in word formation. Using methods such as experiments with aphasic patients and EEG measurements of healthy subjects, we were able to publish significant results. I intend to continue my research toward the goal that first led me to linguistics: "exploring the mechanisms of the human mind."

I am very grateful for the opportunity to have engaged in curriculum reform and education through open discussions at the Faculty of Economics, and to have conducted my research in the rich interdisciplinary environment of the Hiyoshi Campus. I hope that education and intellectual inquiry at Keio University will continue to develop in even better ways.

(Interview conducted in December 2019)