Sayaka Abe, Assistant Professor of Department of Japanese Studies

2019 Topic: Words and Meanings in Flux: A Historical Linguistic Analysis of Japanese Youth Speech

2018 Topic: Indescribable emotions in Japanese: Where meaning and context meet

Biography:

Sayaka Abe teaches Japanese language and linguistics courses at Middlebury. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from University at Buffalo in 2007. Before coming to Middlebury, she held a research position at University of Trento and taught at various institutions, including Vassar College and Williams College. Her primary areas of research are cognitive semantics, pragmatics and language change. Her current projects include examination of how speakers’ subjectivity is encoded in Japanese text and speech. Other interests include corpus linguistics, applied linguistics and typology/cross-linguistic studies.