Photo: Mirjami Sipilä
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland offers a comprehensive set of resources, tools and services in a high-performance environment. Atte Huhtala tells us about his research, where he examines the grammar of Finnic and Permic languages from a meaning-driven perspective.
I am Atte Huhtala. I have a Master’s degree in Finnish Language and currently, I work as a jointly supervised doctoral researcher in Finno-Ugric linguistics at the Universities of Turku and Tartu. I also participate in the activities of two research groups: the project Finnish relations: Changes in Finnish relational predicates from the 16th century to the present (FiRe), led by Tuomas Huumo and funded by the Research Council of Finland; and From East to West: Typological shift in Estonian and the Southern Finnic languages against the background of Uralic (EstTyp), led by Karl Pajusalu and funded by the Estonian Research Council (ETAG).
My main area of research is meaning-driven study of grammar. My doctoral thesis examines the grammatical means of expressing approximative motion in Finnic and Permic languages. In my research, I examine, among other things, the grammatical words luo and tykö, which function as adverbs and postpositions in Finnish and express movement towards someone or something, as well as the grammatical words kohti and päin, which I refer to as target grams. In addition to Finnish, I examine and compare the use of linguistic elements with similar meanings in Estonian and in the Permic languages Komi and Udmurt. Other areas of linguistics that interest me include areal variation in Finnish and Estonian, the comparative typology of Finnic languages, multidisciplinary research on the human past, and the history of Uralic languages.
I became familiar with the Language Bank and its resources during my basic studies of Finnish, when I participated in an introductory course in corpus linguistics, which was organized by FIN-CLARIN. In my Bachelor’s and Master’s theses, I utilised several corpora that are available via the Language Bank: the Finnish sub-corpus of the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland, the Suomi24 corpus representing the online discussion genre, and the Finnish Dialect Corpus of the Syntax Archive. During my studies, I also worked on the project Linguistic Variation in the Province of Satakunta in the 21st Century, whose result, the Sapu corpus, was recently published in the Language Bank.
The Finnish-language material for my doctoral research, like that of my previous theses, comes from the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland for written contemporary language, while the dialect material is drawn from the Dialect Corpus of the Syntax Archive, the Digital Morphology Archive, and the Samples of Spoken Finnish collection.
The diverse resources of the Language Bank have also provided ideas for numerous smaller studies and reviews. One example of this is the presentation I gave at the Kielitieteen päivät (Finnish Conference of Linguistics) in spring 2025, where I examined the use of the word tykö in Old Literary Finnish based on the Morpho-Syntactic Database of Mikael Agricola’s Works.
Huhtala, Atte 2023. Kohti, päin ja vasten. Kohdegrammien semantiikkaa itämerensuomessa. Master’s Thesis. School of Languages and Translation Studies, University of Turku. Available: https://www.utupub.fi/handle/10024/174949
Kurki, Tommi, Huhtala, Atte, Koivunen, Tomi and Mäkitalo, Nelli 2022. Satakuntalaisuus puheessa-korpus ja siitä tehtyjä synkretismihavaintoja. AFinLA-teema 14. p. 103–134. Eds. Lotta Aarikka, Katri Priiki ja Ilmari Ivaska. Available: https://doi.org/10.30660/afinla.111247
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 Humanities of the University of Helsinki.
