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Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Lecturer in the Finnish language Johanna Kalja-Voima tells us about her ongoing research in which she makes use of the Kielipankki resource The Suomi 24 Corpus.
I am Johanna Kalja-Voima, lecturer of the Finnish language at the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyväskylä. I completed my Master’s Degree in 1998 and my Licentiate Degree in 2002 at the Department of Modern Finnish and Translation at the University of Vaasa. I also have Master’s Degree in Economics majoring in marketing from the University of Vaasa from 2012. I started my doctoral research at the University of Jyväskylä in 2018.
The topic of my doctoral research is science and research discourse from the citizen’s point of view. The research aims to find out what kind of discourse dominates in science and research in the discussions carried out on the discussion forum Suomi24. The analysis is realised in the framework of corpus-assisted discourse studies, CADS.
CADS originates in the school of research developed around mid-1990’s where corpus linguistics combined critical discourse analysis and Norman Fairclough’s views. This school later developed in its own direction towards CADS. Parallel to discourse analysis, CADS does not regard studying social inequality and its representation as a starting point; instead, the topics chosen, such as science and research in my study, are studied corpus-aided without a critical approach. (On the development of CADS, see Lehto 2018: 83). In Finland, the corpus-assisted discourse studies are just gaining ground. The corpora available in the Language Bank of Finland have been studied in the CADS framework by Jantunen (2018) and Paldán (2018). Jantunen (2018) has studied the different types of recurring discourses related to homo and hetero roles in Suomi24. Paldán’s (2018) research on discourses on sexual unwillingness in Suomi24 is also related to sexuality. Lehto (2018) has applied CADS in her research on a corpus compiled by herself, focusing on language discourse, i.e. how the Finns living in Japan discuss language.
Jantunen, Jarmo H. 2018: Homot ja heterot Suomi24:ssä: analyysi digitaalisista diskursseista. Puhe ja kieli 38 (1) s. 3-22. https://journal.fi/pk/article/view/65488/32762 5.10.2018.
Lehto, Liisa-Maria 2018: Korpusavuisteinen diskurssianalyysi japaninsuomalaisten kielipuheesta. Acta universitatis Ouluensis. B Humionora 162. Oulun yliopisto (University of Oulu).
Paldán, Maiju 2018: Seksuaalisen haluttomuuden diskurssit Suomi24-korpusaineistossa. Pro gradu -thesis. Jyväskylän yliopiston kielten laitos/University of Jyväskylä.
My research data is the The Suomi 24 Corpus available in the Language Bank of Finland.
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.
