Biography
Dr Iida holds a PhD from the University of Tokyo and is a professor in the Faculty of Global Management at Chuo University, in Tokyo, Japan. She was a visiting scholar at UCLA from 2015 to 2017, and has been a director of Japan Naming Association since 2019.
Her area of specialisation is in the field of linguistics, focusing particularly on analysing how to count things in modern Japanese, known as “numeratives”. She is one of the pioneers in this field, well known as the author of Kazoekata-no-Jiten (The Dictionary of Counting Things) (Shogakukan, 2004), which has sold more than 110,000 copies worldwide.
Currently she is instructing students who specialise in advertising, and holds a seminar titled “How to Attract Consumers from a Linguistic Approach”. She is an active copywriter winning prestigious advertisement contests, such as The Senden-kaigi Award (2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019). She also was an active member of the “Tokyo Sky Tree” Name Review Committee. Her research regarding the techniques of writing copy is crystallised in the book ‘A, sore hoshī!’ To Omowa Seru Kōkoku Kopī no Kotoba Jiten (I want it! The Word Dictionary of Ad Copy) (Nikkei Business Publications, 2017).
Keynote Presentation (2020) | Numeratives in Japanese: How speakers perceive things when they count
