Kuukauden tutkija: Kirsi-Maria Nummila

Kirsi-Maria Nummila

photo: University of Turku

The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Kirsi-Maria Nummila, a docent of Finnish language at the University of Turku, describes her research on several corpora in the Language Bank.

Who are you?

I am Kirsi-Maria Nummila, a Doctor of Philosophy and a docent of Finnish language. I am presently teaching and doing research at the School of Languages and Translation Studies of the University of Turku in the program of Finnish language and Finno–Ugric language research.

What is your research topic?

My main research topics include lexicology, word formation, language development, language contacts and old literary Finnish. I have been analyzing complex native vocabulary, mainly derivations and the development of derivation types, loanwords and medieval names, constructions typical to old literary Finnish, syntactic and morphological loans, and historical code-switching.

How is your research related to the Language Bank?

I have been utilizing the Language Bank’s corpora in nearly all of my research. The Language Bank’s corpora are the most essential source in my research and interests. The most important corpora include Digital Morphology Archive, Finnish Text Collection, The Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland, and the recently introduced Corpus of Old Literary Finnish. It is great that the Morpho-Syntactic Database of Mikael Agricola’s Works produced in a many years’ project funded by the Academy of Finland, in the preparation of which I have been involved, will also be published in the Language Bank in the near future.

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.