Shigeko OkamotoShigeko Okamoto is a Professor in the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. Her areas of research includesociolinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics and functional grammar. She has published numerous articles on Japanese language and gender, honorifics, regional dialects, grammaticization and grammatical constructions. She is a co-editor of the volume Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology (with Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith, 2004). Her latest interest is in semiotic diversity and multiplicity and its relationship to language ideologies. Read More Read Less