Kuva: Heather Shelley
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Zsuzsi Máthé, a visiting Hungarian PhD student at the University of Oulu tells us about her research on the The Finnish Sub-corpus of the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland, Kielipankki Version .
I am Zsuzsi Máthé, a Hungarian PhD student from Transylvania. I have studied Finnish back home, and I’ve been to Finland several times, but this time I decided to come to the northernmost university in Finland where I can do research in cognitive linguistics and the Finnish language. I will do research in Oulu for one year.
I am a researcher within the field of cognitive linguistics. I investigate the conceptual metaphor within the framework of the cognitive metaphor theory, more precisely on how time appears in language and its linguistic metaphorical representations, focusing on metaphors, which entail animacy, such as locomotion and a form of sentiency. My hypothesis is that the way we speak about time and its semantic prosody could differ in Hungarian, English and Finnish, and I will use corpus research to support this claim and to see to what extent such metaphors are language specific or shared among these three languages.
I use three corpora for my research, one for each language, and I found the Finnish material needed for this study at Kielipankki, the Finnish Language Bank. Kielipankki offers a well-balanced, large corpora with relevant genres, including newspapers, literature, academic texts as well as spoken language, which are necessary to reach an empirically relevant conclusion about language. This is my first time using a Finnish corpus; so far I have done research using the National Library’s Journal Collection, The Finnish Sub-corpus of the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland, Kielipankki Version, as well as the Finnish Gutenberg Corpus. I am planning to continue my investigation within the Finnish Spoken Language Corpus, as well as within the Academic Text Collection of the University of Helsinki, The University of Helsinki’s Finnish E-thesis, Korp Version. The available corpus made it possible to carry out both quantitative and qualitative analyses of linguistic and cognitive time metaphors. I used the node word ’time’ and its collocates within the frame of finite verbs in order to determine the raw frequency and relative frequency of such verbs used in a figurative context. The results of the cross linguistic study will be compared in order to find conceptual universals and variants as well as linguistic universals and variants in the aforementioned languages.
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.
