Olga Tsuneko Yokoyama (Russian Ольга Борисовна Йокояма, born September 11, 1942) is a Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research interests include topics in Slavic philology, functionalist constraints in the syntax, word order and intonation of Russian.
Life and career In 1970 Yokoyama received her D.D.S. (Doctor of Dental Science) degree from Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Then she received two M.A. degrees in Slavic linguistics and literature: in 1972 from the University of Illinois and in 1974 from Harvard University where she was one of the students of Roman Jakobson and Susumu Kuno and stayed there to complete her Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics in 1979. Yokoyama then stayed at her alma mater, Harvard University, to start her career as assistant professor, receiving tenure in 1987. In 1995 she moved to California, where she started as professor of Slavic languages and literature at UCLA, moving to Applied Linguistics in 2004. In 2012, she was awarded the title of distinguished professor. Yokoyama's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DAAD-ACLS German-American Commission, and the Modern Humanities Research Association, among others. She has been invited as a visiting scholar to universities in the U.S., Russia, Korea and Japan. Yokoyama received a high recognition from the Russian government as she was awarded a title honorary doctorate by Russian Federation Ministry of Education and Science in 2013.
Research
Discourse and Word Order Yokoyama's book Discourse and Word Order (1986) consists of two parts. In Part 1, Yokoyama proposes a universal cognitive Transactional Discourse Model (TDM) to account for primarily information discourse-initial utterances (directives, statements, effusions/exclamatory sentences, questions) and non-discourse-initial utterances (obligatory responses, voluntary contributions). In Part 2 she demonstrates how this model applies to Russian word order and intonation patterns. She also reviews the studies on Topic and comment by the Prague School: the works of V. Mathesius, F. Daneš, P. Sgall, E. Hajicova, J. Firbas, and P. Adamec without mentioning the earlier sources such as G. v.d. Gabelentz, H. Paul, and W. Wundt. TDM represents verbal communication process between two people, in terms of transaction of seven kinds of knowledge, which Yokoyama graphically displays by using a Venn diagram. Two kinds of metinformational knowledge:
Knowledge of the code (lexicon and grammar of the language) Knowledge of the discourse situation (assessment of the knowledge set of the conversation partner B) Five kinds of informational knowledge:
Referential knowledge – the ability to connect linguistic representation to term. The sentence “I spoke to Jane Smith” is evidence for the fact that A has referential knowledge of Jane Smith. Propositional knowledge – knowledge that some event happened. Specificational knowledge – enables the speaker to replace an unspecified term with a specified term. Existential knowledge – the assumption that that person or place does exist; however there is no specificational knowledge of this person or a place. Predicational knowledge – presupposed by the question “What happened?” and connected to propositional knowledge “Something happened”. It implies predicative and existential knowledge of the terms. In addition, Yokoyama proposes four minimal units of the discourse model: the set of knowledge of the speaker (A); the set of knowledge of the addressee (B); the area of present concern of the speaker (Ca); and the area of present concern of the addressee (Cb). These units undergo changes during the communication process as the transaction of seven kinds of knowledge occurs. TDM presupposes conditions for successful communication: the area of present concern of the speaker and the area of the present concern of the addressee should intersect (Ca∩Cb), i.e. the intersection is not empty, not a null-set. However, it is possible that Ca contains the information that is not within B’s current concern Cb, therefore the imposition of A’s concern will take place, due to the wrong assessment of the discourse situation. Imposition may be seen as a dominating or even aggressive behaviour. Thus TDM explains why people try to minimize imposition on people they don’t know at all, or don’t know well enough. Yokoyama’s analysis is unique in its empirical and well-constructed support to the formal representation of multiple interrelated factors: the knowledge sets of the interlocutors and matters of their current concerns. By examining those minimal units of informal discourse situations, Yokoyama makes it possible to formulate rules governing the intentional transaction of knowledge between conversation partners and apply them to specific examples of modern Russian language.
Publications Over the years of her career Yokoyama has published articles in various journals in the U.S. and internationally and presented at conferences in US, Asia and Europe. The topics cover discourse grammar, gender linguistics, Russian intonation, and analysis of literary language, and the language of the 19th century Russian peasants' correspondence.
Russian Peasant Letters
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