Photo: Emmi Pollari
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland offers a comprehensive set of resources, tools and services in a high-performance environment. Heidi Niva tells us about her research on Finnish grammatical phenomena and introduces a Vepsian-Finnish dictionary project. In a joint research, she also aims to evaluate the corpus of online discussions as a source for a language researcher.
I am Heidi Niva, a postdoc Finnish language researcher. I am currently a substitute lecturer of Finnish language and culture at the University of Helsinki. I am also actively involved in the LOST DOC collective, a community for postdoc language researchers.
Both in my dissertation and afterwards, grammatical phenomena have been in the focus of my research. Among other things, I have studied the structures that are used to express futurity in Finnish. Now I am involved in a joint project where we study the structures expressing avertivity, i.e. non-realization of events. I am also working in a project where we aim to compile a Vepsian-Finnish dictionary. Vepsian, also known as Veps, is a related but endangered language spoken south of Lake Onega (Ääninen). In addition to the dictionary project, I am also doing research on adpositional structures in the Veps language.
In my research on the Finnish grammar, instead of normativity, I am more interested in how people actually use linguistic structures, and what types of meanings and connotations these structures can convey. For this purpose, I have used the resources in Kielipankki: The Suomi24 Sentences Corpus 2001-2020 for the study of Modern Finnish, and the corpora of Early Modern Finnish and Old Literary Finnish for the study of the older forms of the language. I am also currently using the Corpus of Finnish Magazines and Newspapers from the 1990s and 2000s and the Finnish News Agency Archive Corpus.
In fact, the Suomi24 Sentences Corpus 2001-2020 is itself the subject of our joint research with Max Wahlström and Olli Silvennoinen. What is interesting about this corpus is that it largely represents informal language use but is still different from spoken language in terms of its linguistic features. In addition, the corpus is a diverse source in terms of the formality of language use and the occurrence of linguistic phenomena as they seem to be influenced by the various topics of discussion and their styles of expression. In our forthcoming article, we will critically examine what kind of source the Suomi24 corpus actually is for a language researcher.
Niva, Heidi 2022: Suomen progressiivirakenne intentioiden ja ennakoinnin ilmaisuissa. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopisto. Available: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-8727-7
Niva, Heidi 2024: Tulen muistamaan hänet aina. Tulla V-mAAn vääjäämättömän tulevaisuuden ilmaisukeinona. Virittäjä 128(2), 238–263. DOI: 10.23982/vir.126878
The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers of Social Sciences and Humanities to use, refine, preserve and share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.
All previously published Language Bank researcher interviews are stored in the Researcher of the Month archive. This article is also published on the website of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Helsinki.
