Jukka Tyrkkö

PhD, Acting Professor of English, University of Tampere
Collaborating Scholar
E-mail: jukka.tyrkko(at)helsinki.fi or Jukka.Tyrkko(at)uta.fi

I am currently Acting Professor of English at the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies at the University of Tampere. I maintain my affiliation with the University of Helsinki as Adjunct Professor of English Philology and as a collaborating scholar at Varieng. I can be reached at either of the email addresses above.

Research interests

Much of my current research focuses on historical corpus linguistics and book history, and especially on finding intellectual synergies between the two. I also enjoy working on topics arising from historical semantics and pragmatics, particularly on questions related to the development and representation of abstract concepts in science writing. I've carried out several research projects with Turo Hiltunen. Our joint work has covered the frequencies of occurrence of names of illnesses in different medical traditions during the Middle English period, the emerging increase of nominalizations in Early Modern medical writing, the use of knowing verbs in Early Modern medical writing, and existential there-constructions in early medical writing. The common thread in all our joint research has been an interest in how scientific texts reflect complex concepts and the ways in which linguistic features reflect idiosyncratic choices, contemporary sociocultural realities, and contemporary scientific thinking. My recent work in this area also includes several studies of the historical developments of signifier terminology in medical writing.

I have been involved in the beta-testing of several corpus tools and have an interest in developing corpus tools which would integrate easy-to-understand statistical elements and metadata within a search tool. In the field of historical lexicography, I've been a member of the organizing committees of all three HEL-LEX conferences: the first HEL-LEX in 2005, HEL-LEX 2 in 2008, and again of HEL-LEX 3 in 2012. My paper at HEL-LEX 3 examined the terminological and discursive practices of sixteenth century surgeons by means of stylometric statistical analysis. The findings will be published in the conference proceedings.

Gatekeepers of Knowledge

Book history plays a prominent role in my work, particularly as it informs us of the impact that the processes and circumstances of publishing and the book trade had on the dissemination of knowledge, textual structure, and language. I have embarked on an exciting new research project with Carla Suhr and Ville Marttila where we look at the many interrelations between book history, paratextual features, and historical corpus linguistics. To highlight the role of printers, correctors, publishers and booksellers in the production of learned texts, we call the project Gatekeepers of Knowledge. By combining methodologies developed in historical corpus linguistics and stylometrics with in-depth knowledge of the language of early modern medical writing and personal and institutional histories, we aim to develop a new approach to analysing the cross-influences between authorship and publishing as they relate to linguistic and textual features. Our first major joint effort was the thematic session we convened at the 2011 SHARP conference in Washington DC, where my own contribution was a paper on the marketing aspects of title pages of books attributed to Nicholas Culpeper. In 2012 we gave two joint conference papers, one at SHARP 2012 in Dublin, and another, on the more technical aspects of our project, at the 2012 Digital Humanities conference in Hamburg.

We collaborate with the Orationes project in Oulu and Åbo and we are currently writing a joint article on the paratextual features of Early Modern medical texts for an e-volume on digital editing I co-edit with Anneli Meurman-Solin. My personal book historical activities include recent talks at an annotation symposium organised by Matti Kilpiö and Ville Marttila and at the Finnish Society for Book History. I have also written articles on early medical book history, such as a study of the first English medical dictionary and the lexicographical work of the sixteenth century surgeon John Halle. I have recently submitted for review a survey of grammars printed in eighteenth-century dictionaries.

I am also working on a separate smaller project with Anni Sairio on the books of Eliza Haywood and John Newbery. We combine network analysis, multivariate statistical methods and good old book history to uncover the truth behind Eliza Haywood’s alleged role in Newbery’s publications. Another small project has me looking into linguistic adaptation and lexical localisation in eighteenth-century American editions of British medical books.

Scientific thought-styles project

I am a member of the Scientific thought-styles project and one of the editors of the corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT). The corpus was released in 2010 with a book, Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies, detailing its composition and use. My own contributions in the book were a research article, the manual for the corpus tool (with Raymond Hickey and Ville Marttila), chapters on two individual text categories (one with Irma Taavitsainen), and bits and pieces in several other chapters. Our team has also produced a volume entitled Medical Writing in Early Modern England (eds. Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), for which Turo Hiltunen and I wrote a chapter on the discursive uses of knowing verbs. Most recently I gave a paper at ICEHL17 in Zürich on the stylometric analysis of the EMEMT corpus, a study that made use of the new POS-tagged version of EMEMT I created with Turo Hiltunen and Raisa Oinonen.

Work on Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT), the third and final installment of the Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, is already in full swing.

Hypertext and new media

My doctoral thesis, entitled Fuzzy Coherence: Making Sense of Continuity in Hypertext Narratives (2011), examined the concepts of textual coherence and continuity in digital hypertexts with particular reference to how conventional textlinguistic, discourse analytical, and narratological concepts can be extended to hypertextual linking. The theoretically oriented thesis presented a model of the complex processes that are involved in the negotiation of coherence in fragmented and interactive texts. My main argument was that the intelligibility of textual continuity in hypernarratives relies largely on our faculties both to withstand textual ambiguities and to infer coherence relationships from unreliable information. Both of these phenomena involve complexities which can not be reduced to simplified process chains but rather require a hermeneutic approach, which is realised as a phenomenon I've coined fuzzy coherence. My future endeavours in this area involve turning the thesis into a second, slightly refocused monograph, and editing a volume, with Sirpa Leppänen, on the texts and discourses of new media.

EUDDEET

With Hans-Jürgen Diller and Hendrik De Smet, I am in the early stages of a database project aimed at providing systematic, searchable descriptions of English historical texts currently available through online archives and repositories. EUDDEET, or EUropean DAtaBAse of Descriptors of English Electronic Texts, was officially launched at the ESSE 9 conference in August, 2008. We are currently working on the technical implementation of version one, as well as finalizing the descriptors and adding new descriptors to the database. At ICEHL-16 in Pecs, Hungary, we presented a joint paper on the project itself, as well as individual research papers making use of the database. My own contribution revisits one of my favourite topics, the use of sign terms in medical writing. Our first joint article, on the database project itself, came our in The European English Messenger vol 19.2. EUDDEET was one of the main topics of a workshop I convened at the Helsinki Corpus Festival, and we also gave a sneak preview of the forthcoming public database at the software demo session. Somewhat related to the aims of EUDDEET, Hans-Jürgen Diller, Monika Fludernik and I will convene a session on the topic of genres at the 2012 ESSE conference in Istanbul.

EETACS

I am also a member of the Early English Text and Corpus Studies project. So far my contribution has mainly come in the form of some teaching at the St. Petersburg State University and some happy browsing at the National Library of Russia, but I'm looking forward to more focused cooperation with the other members in the future.

eVarieng and other institutional activities

In addition to research, I coordinated a variety of projects at VARIENG in my role as a planning officer from 2006 to 2012. Collectively entitled eVarieng, these online resources are intended to explore new frontiers of academic publishing and resourcing. Some of the most important aspects of that work involved coordinating various corpus resource projects and representing Varieng in various national and international contexts. Another important area of work involved launching the open-access Corpus Resource Database, or CoRD.

I was the managing editor of Varieng's eSeries Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change from 2007 to 2012. From 2013, I will serve as a member of the editorial board.

I am also a Board Member and Treasurer of FINSSE, the Finnish Society for the Study of English.

Teaching and guest lectures

I enjoy teaching, and have taught and co-taught courses since 2004 on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, practical lexicography, and translation. In 2008-2010, I taught a series of corpus linguistic methodology courses at what was then the Department of English. These courses lead to the creation of the Small Corpus of Political Speeches, a corpus that has attracted a pleasant amount of attention and has to date been used by students from around the world for course work and pilot projects. At the University of Tampere, my teaching for the spring semested includes courses on genre and register variation and varieties of English, as well as a Masters seminar.

I am always delighted to be asked to give a lecture or attend an event. Most recently, I visited Vrije Universiteit Brussels for a delightful symposium on digital approaches to philological research.

Publications

In preparation

I am currently editing two volumes in the series Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English: one with Anneli Meurman-Solin on the principles and practices of digital editing and another with Sirpa Leppänen on the texts and discourses of new media. I am also editing the Proceedings of HEL-LEX III with Rod McConchie, Teo Juvonen, Minna Nevala and Mark Kaunisto. I have several articles forthcoming on early modern print culture and book history, on the digital editing of early modern printed texts, and on various aspects of the early modern medical writing.

Published

2012. Tyrkkö Jukka, Matti Kilpiö, Terttu Nevalainen and Matti Rissanen. Introduction. In Tyrkkö Jukka, Matti Kilpiö, Terttu Nevalainen and Matti Rissanen (eds) Outposts of Historical Corpus Linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a Proliferation of Resources. (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 10). Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English: Helsinki.

2012. Tyrkkö Jukka, Matti Kilpiö, Terttu Nevalainen and Matti Rissanen (eds) Outposts of Historical Corpus Linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a Proliferation of Resources. (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 10). Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English: Helsinki.

2012. "A Physical Dictionary (1657): The first English medical dictionary". Reprint. In Considine, John (ed) Ashgate Critical Essays on Early English Lexicography. Volume 4. The Seventeenth Century. Ashgate.

2012. Tyrkkö Jukka and Irma Taavitsainen. "Laajojen tekstimassojen luokitteluperusteista". In Heikkinen, Voutilainen, Lauerma et al. (eds.) Genreanalyysi: tekstilajitutkimuksen käsikirja. Gaudeamus. 310-321.

2011. Fuzzy Coherence: Making Sense of Continuity in Hypertext Narratives. PhD thesis. University of Helsinki.

2011. Hiltunen, Turo and Jukka Tyrkkö. "Existential there constructions in early medical texts". In Rayson Paul, Sebastian Hoffmann, and Geoffrey Leech (eds.), Methodological and Historical Dimensions of Corpus Linguistics. Helsinki: Varieng. (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 6).

2011. “'Halles Lanfranke' and its most excellent and learned expositive table". In Timofeeva, Olga and Tanja Säily (eds.) Words in Dictionaries and History: Essays in Honour of R. W. McConchie. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 17-39.

2011. Hiltunen Turo and Jukka Tyrkkö. "Verbs of Knowing: Discoursive practices in Early Modern vernacular medicine". In Taavitsainen Irma and Päivi Pahta (eds.) Medical Writing in Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 44-74.

2011. Taavitsainen, Irma, Peter Murray Jones, Päivi Pahta, Turo Hiltunen, Ville Marttila, Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr and Jukka Tyrkkö. “Medical texts in 1500–1700 and the corpus of early modern English medical texts”. In Taavitsainen, Irma and Päivi Pahta (eds.) Medical Writing in Early Modern England (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 9-29.

2011. Pahta Päivi, Turo Hiltunen, Ville Marttila, Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr, and Jukka Tyrkkö. "Communicating Galen's Methodus medendi in Middle and Early Modern English". In Pahta, Päivi and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.) Communicating Early English Manuscripts. (Studies in English Language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2010. Diller Hans-Jürgen, Hendrik de Smet, and Jukka Tyrkkö. "A European Database of Descriptors of English Electronic Texts". In The European English Messenger, 19.2 Autumn 2010. 29-35.

2010. Taavitsainen Irma and Jukka Tyrkkö. ”The field of medical writing with fuzzy edges”. In Taavitsainen, Irma and Päivi Pahta (eds.) Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 57-62.

2010. Taavitsainen Irma and Jukka Tyrkkö.  “Category 1. General treatises and textbooks”. In Taavitsainen, Irma and Päivi Pahta (eds.) Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 65-72.

2010. “Category 5. Surgical and anatomical treatises”. In Taavitsainen, Irma and Päivi Pahta (eds.) Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 121-127.

2010. “Sign terms in specific medical genres in early modern medical texts”. In Taavitsainen, Irma and Päivi Pahta (eds.) Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 169-191.

2010. “The corpus tool and special features of Early Modern English Medical Texts”. In Taavitsainen, Irma and Päivi Pahta (eds.) Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 217-218.

2010. Tyrkkö Jukka, Raymond Hickey and Ville Marttila. “Exploring Early Modern English Medical Texts: Manual to EMEMT Presenter.” In Taavitsainen, Irma and Päivi Pahta (eds.) Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 221-279.

2010. Taavitsainen, Irma, Päivi Pahta, Turo Hiltunen, Martti Mäkinen, Ville Marttila, Maura Ratia, Carla Suhr and Jukka Tyrkkö (compilers), with the assistance of Alpo Honkapohja, Anu Lehto and Raisa Oinonen. Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT, 1500–1700). DVD-ROM with EMEMT Presenter software (Raymond Hickey). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

2010. "Hyperlinks: Keywords or Key Words?". In Bondi, Marina and Mike Scott (eds.) Keyness in Texts: Corpus linguistic investigations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 79-91.

2009. Hiltunen Turo and Jukka Tyrkkö. "'Tis well known to barbers and laundresses: Overt references to knowledge in English medical writing from the Middle Ages to the Present Day". In Renouf Antoinette and Andrew Kehoe (eds.) Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassesments. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. 67-87.

2009. Tyrkkö Jukka and Turo Hiltunen. "Frequency of nominalization in Early Modern English medical writing". In Andreas Jucker, Marianne Hundt & Daniel Schreier (eds.) Corpora: Pragmatics and Discourse. Papers from the 29th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 293-316.

2009. McConchie R.W., Alpo Honkapohja and Jukka Tyrkkö (eds.) Selected Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on New Approaches to English Historical Lexis 2 (HEL-LEX 2). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

2009. "A Physical Dictionary (1657): The first English medical dictionary". In McConchie R.W., Alpo Honkapohja and Jukka Tyrkkö (eds.) Selected Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on New Approaches to English Historical Lexis 2 (HEL-LEX 2). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 171-187.

2009. "Hypertext and streams of consciousness: coherence redefined". In Hotz-Davies, Ingrid, Anton Kirchhofer and Sirpa Leppänen (eds.) Internet Fictions. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2-23.

2008. "Kaleidoscope narratives and the act of reading". In Pier John and José Ángel Garcia Landa (eds.) Theorizing Narrativity (Narratologia 12). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. 277-305.

2007. "Towards multimedia in corpus studies: introduction". In Päivi Pahta, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen and Jukka Tyrkkö. In Towards Multimedia in Corpus Studies (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English 2). Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English: Helsinki.

2007. Päivi Pahta, Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen and Jukka Tyrkkö (eds). Towards Multimedia in Corpus Studies (Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, volume 2).

2007. “Making Sense of Digital Textuality”. In European Journal of English Studies 11.2, New Textualities. 147-161.

2006. "Tokens, signs, and symptoms: Signifier terms in medical texts from 1375 to 1725”. In McConchie R.W., Heli Tissari, Olga Timofeeva and Tanja Säily (eds.) Selected Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 155-165.

2006. "Reading as dialogue - Interacting with the electronic text". In Taavitsainen Irma, Juhani Härmä and Jarmo Korhonen (eds.) Dialogic Language Use (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique LXVI), 123-146.

2006. " From tokens to symptoms: 300 years of developing discourse on medical diagnosis in English medical writing". In Dossena Marina and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) Diachronic Perspectives on Domain-Specific English . Bern: Peter Lang. 229-255.

2004. "Negotiating Coherence in Hypertextual Linking". In Belgian Journal of English Language and Literatures , Linguistics/Literature Interface, 133-151.

2004. "Verkkojen selvittelyä" (”Sorting out Webs”). In Rissanen Matti, Terttu Nevalainen and Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) Englannin Aika. Helsinki: WSOY. 212-223.