Category Archives: In memorium

In memoriam: Hideki Zamma

We have received some sad news about Hideki Zamma, and tributes from Shigeto Kawahara and Arto Anttila. Please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section.

From Shigeto Kawahara

Hideki Zamma passed away on March 22nd, 2016, a week after he was involved in a car accident, at the age of 46. Hideki was a very active phonologist, and professor at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies. His research focused on phonological variation and formal phonological theory. He worked on various topics including rendaku, Japanese accent, English stress, and formal properties of local conjunction. His recent book “Patterns and Categories in English Suffixation and Stress Placement: A Theoretical and Quantitative Study” (Kaitakusha, 2013), based on his PhD thesis submitted to Tsukuba University (2012), explored item-specific behaviors of different English suffixes within the framework of unranked constraints in Optimality Theory, which won a prize from the English Linguistic Society of Japan as well as Ichikawa Prize. In addition to his research, he served as a board/organizing/editorial member for the Phonological Society of Japan, the Phonetic Society of Japanese, and the English Linguistic Society of Japan. In addition to being a great researcher, he was also a caring and dedicated teacher. Hideki kept trying to make linguistic materials as assessable as possible, for example, by teaching distinctive features based on “slips of the ear” patterns, using a famous Japanese TV show. He will be greatly missed by his family, friends, colleagues, and students.

From Arto Anttila:

Hideki was a visiting scholar at Stanford in 2009-10. His 2012
Ph.D. thesis “Patterns and Categories in English Suffixation and
Stress Placement: A Theoretical and Quantitative Study” is a
remarkable new contribution to the difficult area of English word
stress where Hideki goes beyond earlier work in presenting an
innovative Optimality Theoretic approach to quantitative patterns in
the English lexicon. In 2014 his work earned him two prestigious
awards: the Ichikawa Prize and the ELSJ Prize from the English
Linguistic Society of Japan. Hideki was an extremely kind and
thoughtful person and a good friend. He will be missed by many who got to know him at Stanford.