Olga T. Yokoyama

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.

Yokoyama's book Russian Peasant Letters include a collection of letters exchanged between members of the Stafanovs/Zhernakovs family, which represent an invaluable primary source for studying dialectal speech typical of the Vyatka region in the second half of the 19th century.

Yokoyama's study is important both linguistically, presenting the original north-eastern dialectal speech of peasants in the 19th century, and historically, showing the real struggles of peasants striving for upward mobility in pre-revolutionary Russia. Yokoyama conducted a thorough linguistic analysis of the language of the letters, covering such aspects as phonology, word change, word order, syntax, discourse, pragmatics, poetic aspects and variations . However, historiographers may find the historical part of research incomplete, but still a valuable source for research on life of Russian peasants in the 19th century.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Most of the letters were addressed to Yokoyama's grandfather Vasiliy Zhernakov, who in 1881, at the age of 17, left home in the former Vyatka Province for Siberia to earn money and eventually became a successful merchant and philanthropist. Yokoyama recognized that this is a valuable source for studying the language and economic conditions of common people in Russia in the late 19th century.