Suomeksi | På svenska | På finlandssvenskt teckenspråk
Photo: Petteri Kivimäki
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland offers a comprehensive set of resources, tools and services in a high-performance environment. Satu Siltaloppi tells us about her research on Finland-Swedish Sign Language.
I am Satu Siltaloppi. I have a background in sign language interpreting, and I have since studied for a master’s degree in Scandinavian languages, and written my doctoral thesis on the grammar of Finland-Swedish Sign Language. I currently work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Sign Language Centre at the University of Jyväskylä (JYU). I completed my doctoral thesis at the University of Helsinki in 2023 and worked on a three-year project at Tampere University (TAU) both before and after my thesis defence. I started as a postdoctoral researcher at JYU in January 2025.
I do research on Finland-Swedish Sign Language, its grammar and usage. In my doctoral thesis, I focused on list constructions and examined what they look like and how they are used. In the project at TAU, which was funded by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS), I studied how sign language users adapt their sign language in different contexts, similar to the use of Easy Language. Now at JYU, I have studied question constructions in the corpus material – how do Finland-Swedish Sign Language users express questions? I am interested in communication and interaction in sign language and everything that happens in it, including sharing and understanding meanings.
The Language Bank of Finland is very important for my work. In my current research, I use the Corpus of Finland-Swedish Sign Language (CFSTS). One of the very first things I looked at was how the topic of my doctoral thesis, list constructions, is used as a shared resource in the corpus. By shared resource, I mean situations in which one signer creates a list construction and the other uses it without recreating it. My research material for the doctoral thesis consisted of monologues, so I couldn’t address this at the time. I have also had time to look at how question constructions are used in the corpus material and have come up with many other topics that can be studied thanks to the corpus material – there is work to be done! At the same time, I see that the current corpus material cannot provide answers to all the things we are interested in and need to research. I hope and believe that in the future we will be able to collect more material that can then also be published in the Language Bank.
I am extremely grateful for the groundwork that has been done for annotation at the sign level and for translation of the corpus material. However, the work is not yet complete, as some of the videos have not been annotated at all, and we also need other types of annotations. I am currently working with a university trainee to make CLU annotations for the corpus material. CLU, or clause-like unit, annotation means that we are making syntactic annotations for units that resemble clauses. The CLU annotations will enable, for example, analyses of different clause types. Because they are based on the discussion material in the corpus, they will also enable various conversation and interaction analysis studies.
”Researcher of the Month: Satu Siltaloppi” in Finland-Swedish Sign Language (video) | YouTube
Siltaloppi, Satu (2025). Anpassning av det finlandssvenska teckenspråket. In C. Lindholm, M. Kivilehto & S. Siltaloppi (ed.), Lätt svenska i Finland. Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 150–168. SLS. Available: https://www.sls.fi/publications/latt-finlandssvenska/
Valtasalmi, Idastiina, Satu Siltaloppi, Vilma Wacklin & Liisa Mustanoja (2025). Kymmenen havaintoa syrjimättömästä kielestä. In: K. Jänis & I. Salminen (ed.), Kieli ja kirjallisuus muuttuvassa yhteiskunnassa. Äidinkielen opettajain liiton vuosikirja 2025, 99–129. Äidinkielen opettajain liitto.
Wilcox, Sherman, André Xavier & Satu Siltaloppi (2023). List Construction in Two Signed Languages. Language and Cognition. 1–36. doi: 10.1017/langcog.2023.19
Siltaloppi, Satu (2023). List construction in Finland-Swedish Sign Language. Dissertation, University of Helsinki. Available: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-8955-4
Siltaloppi, Satu (2019). Finlandssvenskt teckenspråk. Listkonstruktion, koherens och konstruktionsgrammatik. In M. Bianchi, D. Håkansson, B. Melander, L. Pfister, M. Westman & C. Östman (ed.), Svenskans beskrivning 36. Förhandlingar vid trettiosjätte sammankomsten. Uppsala 25–27 oktober 2017. Uppsala: Institutionen för nordiska språk vid Uppsala universitet. 281–293. Available: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1313414/FULLTEXT01.pdf
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 of Social Sciences and Humanities to use, refine, preserve and 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. This article is also published on the website of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Helsinki.
