Photo: Rena Lorenz
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Maximilian Murmann, researcher at the LMU Munich tells us about his research on the Suomi24 corpus, the Corpus of Old Literary Finnish and the Corpus of Early Modern Finnish.
My name is Maximilian Murmann. I am a linguist at the LMU Munich and I recently defended my doctoral thesis in Finnish/Finno-Ugric Studies (cotutelle with the University of Helsinki). Apart from research, I am responsible for the administration of the Erasmus+ project “Integrating Finno-Ugric Studies in Europe”. I also translate fiction and non-fiction from Finnish and Estonian into German.
My main research interests lie in the study of linguistic phenomena from a usage-based perspective. Currently, I focus on how emotions are expressed in the Finnish language. My doctoral thesis is a corpus-based study of inchoative emotion verbs (e.g. suuttua ‘get angry’ and pelästyä ‘get frightened’), with a special emphasis on the grammatical and lexical realization of stimulus arguments. Corpus linguistic methods hold a lot of promise for the interdisciplinary field of emotion research and I plan to expand my work on the semantics of Finnish emotion terms in future research. Furthermore, I am interested in the various uses of the Finnish local cases and argument structure change.
The empirical part of my doctoral thesis makes use of the Suomi24 corpus, which is based on the eponymous discussion forum. Online discussions appear to be a good place to find authentic emotional talk and the database is also large enough to provide quantifiable insights on less frequent words (e.g. hämmästyä ‘be astonished’). Besides, I used the Corpus of Old Literary Finnish and the Corpus of Early Modern Finnish in order to find out how certain argument structure alternations (e.g. suuttua ‘get angry’ + allative/elative/illative) are related to diachronic change.
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.
