Photo: Sonja Hakkarainen
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. MA Annika Liiti tells us about her research on the corpus International Corpus of Learner Finnish (ICLFI).
I am Annika Liiti, Master of Arts of the University of Oulu. My major was Finnish language and my master’s thesis was published in December 2017.
In my master’s thesis I have studied morphosyntactic verb errors made by learners of Finnish whose mother tongue is Swedish. Learners have used verb forms that are correct, yet they have been used in a wrong context. I have used the term virhekäyttö, misuse, for these errors as the learners have been able to form a verb yet the fault is in the way they use it. In my research I wanted to find out which forms learners use that differ from the ones that natives would use in written standard Finnish. My intent has been to describe how Swedish speaking learners of Finnish use Finnish language and not to point out how they use Finnish language and verbs incorrectly. In my research I wanted to find out which verb forms cause difficulty to Swedish speaking learners of Finnish and which verb forms they use to replace others. I also wanted to find out if Swedish as a mother tongue has an effect to the verb forms learners use and whether this effect can be traced.
I studied written texts that Swedish speaking learners of Finnish, who live in Sweden, have written and they are from the International Corpus of Learner Finnish (ICLFI) which can be found in Kielipankki. My research material was the error annotated corpus of Swedish learners. When I studied Finnish as a second and foreign language in the university of Oulu I took part in error annotating of the corpus and as I became familiar of ICFLI I wanted to study it myself as well.
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 in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to 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.
