He is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1964 and spent his entire career.

and A.M. from Tokyo University where he received a thorough grounding in linguistics under the guidance of Shirō Hattori.

Kuroda, an early advocate of Chomskyan approaches to language, that Kuno undertook his first studies in transformational grammar.

Kuno is known for his discourse-functionalist approach to syntax known as functional sentence perspective and for his analysis of the syntax of Japanese verbs and particularly the semantic and grammatical characteristics of stativity[2] and the semantic correlates of case marking and constraints on scrambling.

In the preface to the second of a pair of festschrifts for Kuno, its editors describe these interests as "[extending] not only to syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, but also to computational linguistics and other fields such as discourse study and the processing of kanji, Chinese characters used in Japan".