Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Eero Voutilainen, PhD student at the University of Helsinki, tells us about his research on Plenary Sessions of the Parliament of Finland, Helsinki Korp Version.
I’m Eero Voutilainen, senior specialist at the Records Office of the Parliament of Finland and PhD student at the University of Helsinki.
In my forthcoming doctoral dissertation I am writing about linguistic norms and the regulation of interactions in the plenary sessions of the Parliament of Finland. What I’m interested in are how norms interact, how they are negotiated and how they affect the linguistic choices of the Members of Parliament. Although it is commonly thought that a plenary session is just a collection of monologues, it actually involves quite a lot of interaction.
I have also done research, e.g., on linguistic genres, ideologies of language planning, the relationship between spoken and written language as well as the translative case in Finnish.
In my doctoral research I am using the Plenary Sessions of the Parliament of Finland, Helsinki Korp Version, which can be found in the Language Bank of Finland. Thanks to this resource I could e.g. retrieve the utterances recorded in the plenary sessions’ minutes of the chairman managing the flow of conversation. One can also search in the resource in a comparatively convenient manner for comments of MPs on the instructions and recommendations they have received.
In my research I also compare the discussions retrieved from the minutes to the video recordings of the plenary sessions. Various editorial changes have been made to the minutes in order to ensure their readability, which is something one should be aware of when using the minutes in order to study the language of the plenary sessions.
Thanks to FIN-CLARIN, I was also able to participate in the CLARIN workshop in Sofia, Working with Parliamentary records, held in March 2017. The workshop focused on parliamentary corpora collected in different countries, on the solutions used for the collection of these resources as well as on the question of how to use them in various human and social science researches. For details on the program of the workshop and its presentations, please click the link above.
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.
