Junko Itō is a linguist. She was born in Japan and works in the United States. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1986 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her doctoral supervisor was Alan Prince. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was chair of the department from 1999-2006.

Itō mostly researches phonology and morphology. Her work on syllable structure is well-known. She has studied and written about rendaku in the Japanese language.  Her work has been published in Linguistic Inquiry and other peer-reviewed research journals in linguistics. She often works with another UCSC professor, her husband Armin Mester.

She is the daughter of mathematician Kiyoshi Itō.

Publications 
2015  Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. The perfect prosodic word in Danish. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 38(1). 5-36.

2015  Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Sino-Japanese Phonology. Chapter 7 of Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology. 2015. ed. by H. Kubozono. pp. 289–312.

2015  Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Word Formation and Phonological Processes. Chapter 9 of Handbook of Japanese Phonetics and Phonology. 2015. ed. by H. Kubozono. pp. 363–395. Mouton de Gruyter Series Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics.

2013 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Prosodic Subcategories in Japanese. Lingua 124. 20-40.

2009	Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. The onset of the prosodic word. In Parker, Steve, ed. Phonological Argumentation: Essays on Evidence and Motivation. London: Equinox. 227-260.

2009 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Lexical classes in phonology. In Miyagawa, Shigeru, and Mamoru Saito, eds. Handbook of Japanese Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 84-106.

2007 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Prosodic adjunction in Japanese compounds. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 55: Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics 4. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 97-111.

2003	Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Japanese Morphophonemics: Markedness and Word Structure. MIT Press Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Series 41. Cambridge, Mass.

1999 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. The structure of the phonological lexicon. In Tsujimura, Natsuko, ed. The Handbook of Japanese Linguistics. Malden, MA, and Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers. 62-100.

1996 Ito, Junko, Yoshihisa Kitagawa, and Armin Mester. Prosodic faithfulness and correspondence. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 5. 217-294.
1995	Ito, Junko, Armin Mester, and Jaye Padgett. Licensing and redundancy: underspecification in Optimality Theory. Linguistic Inquiry 26. 571-614.

1995 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. Japanese phonology. In Goldsmith, John, ed.,The Handbook of Phonological Theory. Blackwell. 817-838.

1986 Ito, Junko, and Armin Mester. The phonology of voicing in Japanese: theoretical consequences for morphological accessibility. Linguistic Inquiry 17.1. 49-73. 1985 Ito, Junko. Consonant Loss in Danish and Phonological Theory, Descriptive and Applied Linguistics 18, 109-120.

1984 Ito, Junko. Melodic Dissimilation in Ainu, Linguistic Inquiry 15.3, 505-513.

Other websites 
Video: Junko Ito, Armin Mester (UC Santa Cruz), 2013: Supersized Units: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duYc4W4Lhp4

Related pages 
List of women linguists

References 

American academics
Linguists
Living people
Educators from California