Photo: Rodolfo Basile
Rodolfo Basile tells us about his research on constructions that express locative and existential meanings in Finnish and other Finnic languages. Resources from the Language Bank of Finland have played a role in all of his research articles on Finnish.
I am an Italian linguist whose career began with the Finnish language. At the University of Naples ”L’Orientale”, I studied Finnish Language and Literature as my main subject at both bachelor’s and master’s level. I also studied German as a minor and improved my Swedish language skills during an Erasmus exchange at the University of Helsinki. In Helsinki, I worked as a teaching assistant in Italian and Finnish language courses. After completing my master’s degree, I joined FILI (Finnish Literature Exchange) in Helsinki as a trainee through the Finnish in Finland training programme funded by the Finnish National Agency for Education.
In 2024, I completed my PhD in Finnic Languages jointly at the Universities of Tartu and Turku under a cotutelle agreement. During my doctoral studies, I also taught Finnish. After earning my PhD, I moved to Kyoto, Japan, to work as a postdoctoral researcher.
In my doctoral dissertation, I investigated a group of morphosyntactic constructions that I refer to as invenitive constructions in Finnish. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, I examined these structures within the context of European languages. Invenitive constructions express locative and existential meanings through the use of the Finnish verb löytyä (‘to be found’), which replaces the copula olla (‘to be’). Comparable functions are expressed in other European languages through similar verbal strategies.
Since completing my doctoral dissertation, I have continued my research on invenitive constructions in Estonian, comparing them with their Finnish counterparts, while focusing on a variety of other research areas. For example, I have been working on voice and valency in Finnish and Italian as well as causative constructions. I have also been conducting research on the typology of locational and possessive clauses in Livonian, which is currently awaiting publication. At present, I am finishing up a similar project on the Koman languages spoken in the border region between Sudan and Ethiopia, in collaboration with an Ethiopian colleague.
My current research interests include the expression of locational meaning through transitive verbs from a pragmatic-typological perspective, the study of two-place verbs, and the comparative documentation of several Austronesian languages, including Toba Batak, Manggarai, and Uab Meto (aka Dawan), using data elicited from grammatical questionnaires.
The resources available through the Language Bank are easy to use, and I have relied on them in all of my research articles on Finnish. The Finnish texts in the Newspaper and Periodical Corpus of the National Library of Finland (KLK) were the first dataset I learned to work with, and they enabled me to publish the first research article of my career.
The Suomi24 corpus has been particularly useful, as it provides a large amount of data and makes it possible to investigate a wide range of grammatical phenomena through the language used by ordinary people in everyday communication. It also allows researchers to examine linguistic variation in depth, revealing even rare patterns of language use.
Basile, Rodolfo. 2025a. Invenitive-locational constructions in the languages of Europe. In Däbritz, Chris Lasse, Budzisch, Josefina & Basile, Rodolfo (eds.). Locative and existential predication: On forms, functions and neighboring domains, 367–402. Berlin: Science Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16759903
Basile, Rodolfo. 2025b. Dal finlandese all’estone: considerazioni tipologiche e cenni diacronici sulle costruzioni invenitive. Studi Finno-Ugrici, n.S., 5. https://doi.org/10.6093/1826-753X/13042
Basile, Rodolfo. 2025c. The Finnish Existential Partitive Construction: Comparing Two Applications of Collostructional Analysis. In Leuschner, T., Vajnovszki, A., Delaby, G. & Barðdal, J. (eds.) How to Do Things with Corpora: Methodological Issues and Case Studies on Grammar, 67–89. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-69690-3_4
Basile, Rodolfo. 2024. ‘I am also found on Facebook’: Locuphoric ‘Find’-Based Strategies in Finnish Internet Corpora. In Glaser, E., Sleeman, P., Strobel, T., & Tamm, A. (eds.). Partitive Constructions and Partitive Elements Within and Across Language Borders in Europe (Vol. 3). Edizioni Ca’Foscari-Venice University Press. http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-795-1/007
Basile, Rodolfo & Ivaska, Ilmari. 2021. Löytyä-verbin konstruktioiden yhteydessä esiintyvä subjektin sijanvaihtelu. Eesti ja soome-ugri keeleteaduse ajakiri. Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics, 12(1), 11-39. https://doi.org/10.12697/jeful.2021.12.1.01
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.
