photo: Inari Niininen
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers who use language resources. Jarmo Jantunen, professor of Finnish language at the University of Jyväskylä and adjunct professor of Finnish translation at the University of Tampere, tells us about his research on various Kielipankki corpora.
I am Jarmo Jantunen, professor of Finnish language at the University of Jyväskylä and adjunct professor of Finnish translation at the University of Tampere. Previously I have worked at the Finnish Department of the University of Joensuu (nowadays University of Eastern Finland) and the University of Oulu in different positions. My field of research is corpus linguistics.
Most of my research focuses on the usage of language and especially on vocabulary. In my doctoral thesis I studied the vocabulary of Finnish translations and later on I have done research on learner Finnish texts from the viewpoint of the usage of language, vocabulary and language learning. My most recent research deals with the vocabulary of online discussions and with queer linguistics. In my research I am particularly interested in the conscious and unconscious connections between different words in their textual context, such as collocations, as well as other more abstract lexico-grammatical and lexico-semantical relations. In research, these phenomena are usually referred to as phraseology.
I have been using Kielipankki corpora both for teaching and research purposes for a long time. In my courses on corpus linguistics, vocabulary and lexicography, as well as in my training courses for teachers of Finnish as a Second Language, I have leaned on various corpora in Kielipankki. In my research, I have often used the Finnish Text Collection on which the “Suurella sydämellä ihan sikana” dictionary of phrases was built upon. Personally, I consider the International Corpus of Learner Finnish (ICLFI) important. I started gathering texts for this resource in 2007 and created it in the framework of an international project. The corpus contains more than one million words written by students of Finnish as a foreign language in different parts of the world. The corpus is grammatically annotated and the annotation of grammar mistakes is an ongoing process at the moment. ICLFI is a resource I have used comprehensively in my research as well as in the courses I have held. In my most recent research on queer linguistics, as well as in my most recent courses, I have used the Suomi 24 Sentences Corpus.
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.
