Dr. Rumiko Shinzato

Biography

Rumiko Shinzato is a Professor Emerita at the School of Modern Languages, specializing in pragmatics, historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, as well as Japanese and Okinawan linguistics. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Hawaii and joined the Georgia Tech faculty as an Assistant Professor in Japanese in 1991, later being promoted to Professor in 2004. Throughout her career, Shinzato has published numerous articles in refereed journals, including the Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Historical Pragmatics, Linguistics, Language Sciences, Journal of Japanese Linguistics, and Gengo Kenkyu. Her contributions include chapters in edited volumes published by John Benjamins and Mouton de Gruyter. Notably, she co-authored the books 'Synchrony and Diachrony in Okinawan Kakari Musubi: A Comparative Perspective on Premodern Japanese' (2013) and 'Language and Old Okinawan Omoro Sōshi: Reference Grammar and Textual Selections' (2022), both published by Brill. Shinzato also contributed to the joint project 'Advanced/Intermediate Language Culture Song', which received funding from the Department of Education. Her efforts have been supported by grants from the North East Association of Asian Council and the Japan Foundation. Currently, she is developing the Okinawan Spoken Language Corpus as part of a project funded by the Ministry of Japan from 2019 to 2023. She has also been an invited visiting professor at UCLA in Spring 2023.

Research Interests

Courses