Mary Kato, a short bio

Despite her Japanese ancestry, Mary defines herself as Brazilian, both “by geography and at heart”. And this entirely fits her story, no matter the complexity of the details involved.

With a Japanese father and a Japanese American mother, Mary Aizawa was born in 1934, in São Paulo, Brazil, not far from the neighbourhood – Liberdade – that is home to the biggest Japanese community outside Japan. She spoke only Japanese until she went to school, and there, at around 6, she started learning standard Portuguese (“português culto”), the one that was taught to first graders. Six years later her father made her study English as well, and so she soon became trilingual, a value that would be even more expanded by a life committed to uncovering the secret rules and patterns of language variation.

Her first choice for a graduation area was in fact Mathematics, but she went to literature and languages instead because, according to her father, that’s what women did – and she was so grateful that she could go to university at all, that she enrolled in Anglo Germanic studies with no further complaint. Her love of Mathematics, however, turned out to be quite useful in her linguistic work (especially for her analyses within semantics), besides being passed to her eldest daughter, who became a Mathematician.

With the arrival of three of her four children – three girls and one boy – she interrupted the teaching activities that she had maintained for two years. But then something came about that would have unexpected consequences: on her way back from visiting her husband, Ariaki Kato, when he was temporarily living in Japan with a post-doc grant, she went to see a friend in the United States who, despite having two little daughters, managed to work professionally and to study at the same time, with no extra staff to help her. And so the young mother Mary Kato, a lover of Mathematics and now also very fond of language studies, got it into her head that she, too, would go back to school.

A long life of achievements ensued, both academic and related to the human heart: as impressive as her CV is, with its massive list of publications, courses and international projects, the truth is that no text, no sentence, no formal tribute or casual observation about Mary is only focused on her academic feats. The precious partnerships she has established over the years with several great linguists in different continents, the caring attention she has devoted to her numerous students, the bridges she has solidly created and cherished between people and between areas in linguistics that might otherwise be rivals, all these traits consistently accompany anything that is said about Mary, because that’s who she is. For everyone.

This part of her remarkable life thus started with an MA (1970) at the University of São Paulo (USP), for which she studied the phonology and morphology of English under a structuralist perspective. She also had a job as a teacher at the União Cultural Brasil-Estados Unidos but hated the structuralist way of teaching. Then an article in the Time magazine caught her attention: it concerned linguistics. It was based on a conversation with Noam Chomsky and, as she read it, she immediately concluded that this was the line of inquiry she wanted to pursue, which was definitely confirmed by her attendance of the first ever Abralin conference, whose programme included speakers specializing in generative studies.

This was followed by a PhD at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC), with the dissertation A Representação Semântica do Artigo Definido (1973). She first wanted to do research on Japanese syntax for her thesis, but ended up choosing this Portuguese topic within semantics because of a quite intriguing question she kept asking herself: how come it is so difficult to teach the Portuguese definite article to Japanese students? What is it that’s so special about them? So she set off for discovering it herself.

The great passion for generative syntax hit her even more when, in 1974, she started attending the annual Linguistic Institutes sponsored by the Linguistic Society of America (she later attended five more of them: 1977, 1979, 1982, 1986, and 2001), where she met excellent professors, some of whom would become good friends with her. Even then, she had to overcome what seemed to her an important limitation – that the generative analyses were more concerned with ‘restrictions’ (what languages prohibit) than with what languages positively do. But this, too, would soon change for the better, with the generative enterprise gradually extending to novel perspectives.

A succession of publications followed, both in education (reading and writing) and on the syntax of Portuguese varieties (language acquisition, and language variation and change), sometimes on her own and others in fruitful collaborations, in Brazil and abroad. She was part of the faculty at PUC for about seventeen years, starting as an Assistant Professor in 1970, then as an Adjunct Professor between 1979 and 1982, and finally as a Full Professor from 1982 to 1987. An then she changed to the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), where she stayed forever after.

Her trilingual upbringing motivates in her some self-doubt regarding her own grammatical judgments, but it certainly gives her a lot of joy as well. The former is overtly assumed (as part of her honest attitude, plus her expertise about the effects of language contact), and the latter – the joy – makes itself evident in various occasions, especially when we listen to her own jokes about it. They are warm and funny stories, emphasized by a contagious laughter that is another salient quality of Mary, this extraordinary person by geography and at heart!

Based on an informal conversation that Mary had with Dermeval da Hora, in April 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVTikhNkp9w