Researcher of the Month: Paul-Thor Holmberg

 

photo: Valtteri Airaksinen

Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Paul-Thor Holmberg, Master of Arts of the University of Oulu, tells us about his research on the Finnish Tree Bank and the Finnish Sub-corpus of the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland.

Who are you?

I’m Paul-Thor Holmberg, Master of Arts of the University of Oulu. My major degree was in Finnish language. My Master’s thesis was published in December 2016.

What is your research topic?

In my Master’s thesis I discuss how the route of the variable expressed by the verbs mennä (to go) and tulla (to come) are windowed in Finnish. Windowing means the way in which the language user’s conceptualisation of the situation is reflected in the language, that is, what is (s)he decides to verbalize and what is it that (s)he decides to omit.

How is your research related to Kielipankki?

The resources I am using in my research are the Finnish Tree Bank 3 and the Finnish Sub-corpus of the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland, both of them to be found in 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.