Photo: Timo Tuovinen
Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Harri Uusitalo tells us about his research using various types of Finnish-language corpora from different time periods.
I am Harri Uusitalo, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turku. I am a researcher of the Finnish language and currently, I am working at the School of History, Culture and Arts Studies in the interdisciplinary projects Fauna et Flora Fennica and Disappeared, Endangered and Newly Arrived Species: The Human Relationship with the Changing Biodiversity of the Baltic Sea. In the research groups, we examine the historical relationship of the Finnish people with nature.
I have studied Finnish texts from different periods, from the time of Agricola to the present day. My doctoral thesis focused on the legal language of the 17th century, and more recently I have been fascinated by environmental themes and ecolinguistic perspectives.
Together with my colleagues, I have used the Kielipankki data in some of my research. For example, together with Karita Suomalainen, we used the Suomi24 corpus and the Korp tool to investigate how Finnish people identify and discuss invasive alien species. With Duha Elsayed and Heidi Salmi, we used the Morpho-Syntactic Database of Mikael Agricola’s Works to study the translative form of the A-infinitive in Agricola’s works.
In my future research, I will certainly make use of many other corpora in Kielipankki, such as the Corpus of Old Literary Finnish, the Corpus of Early Modern Finnish and the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland.
Uusitalo Harri, Lähdesmäki Heta, Sonck-Rautio Kirsi, Latva Otto, Salmi Hannu & Alenius Teija (forthcoming): Alien Plants between Practices and Representations: the Cases of European Spruce and Beach Rose in Finland. Plant Perspectives.
Uusitalo Harri & Suomalainen Karita 2023: Ecolinguistic Approach to Online Finnish Discourse on Invasive Alien Species. Language@Internet 21. https://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2023/uusitalo
Elsayed Duha, Salmi Heidi & Uusitalo Harri 2022: A-infinitiivin translatiivi Mikael Agricolan teksteissä. Sananjalka 64. Suomen Kielen Seura, Turku. DOI: 10.30673/sja.107377
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, 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.
