Researcher of the Month: Maria Huttu-Hiltunen

Maria Huttu-Hiltunen - kuva: Mikko Puhakka
Photo: Mikko Puhakka

 

Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Maria Huttu-Hiltunen, teacher of mother tongue and literature tells us about her research on the corpus International Corpus of Learner Finnish (ICLFI).

Who are you?

My name is Maria Huttu-Hiltunen, but everybody calls me Maija. Last summer, in 2017, I graduated from the University of Oulu where my major was the Finnish Language. Now I work as a teacher of mother tongue and literature in Kirkkonummi, the Helsinki metropolitan area.

What is your research topic?

In my Master’s thesis I investigated three relative structures in Finnish (joka ‘that, which’, mikä ‘what’ and kuka ‘who’) in texts written in Finnish by Estonian learners. The focus in my research was to analyze what kind of errors the learners had done in each group of relative structures, and what might have caused the errors identified in the analysis. One line of thought was, among other things, to assess whether some errors might have been a result of interference or transfer from Estonian to Finnish

How is your research related to Kielipankki?

The data were gathered from the International Corpus of Learner Finnish (ICLFI) deposited in The Language Bank of Finland, Kielipankki.

 

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.