Who are you?
I am Jussi Ylikoski, a linguist. I have been working at the University of Oulu for five years as a professor of Saami language, but starting in the autumn of 2022, I will be a professor of Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Turku. So, I do research on quite a few languages, including Finnish.
What is your research topic?
I have worked on quite a large number of research topics on Finnish and other Uralic languages, and partly outside the Uralic family, too. I have mainly focused on grammars (morphology and syntax) of both better- and lesser-known languages, and occasionally also on etymology. When describing present-day languages, I often can’t help looking at them also from a diachronic perspective, and when I study the historical development of these languages, I tend to pay quite a lot of attention to the actual use of modern languages in the light of real text corpora.
How is your research related to Kielipankki?
I have used the corpora available in the Language Bank of Finland particularly as a researcher of Finnish grammar. As early as in 2003, I published an article in which I used the
In recent years, I have been fascinated by the larger and larger text corpora containing billions of words that are available through the Language Bank of Finland and other CLARIN services. In my research, I have used e.g. the
I have made my most exciting observations when studying forms that were previously considered as clear-cut derivations, such as lauantaisin ‘on Saturdays’ and viikonloppuisin ‘on weekends’ or kunnittain ‘by/across municipalities’ and aihealueittain ‘by/across thematic areas’. In the multi-billion word corpora searchable through the Korp interface of the Language Bank of Finland, it is possible to find hundreds or even thousands of relatively natural sentences, in which even these kinds of forms can have various modifiers that make them look like noun inflections: elokuun lauantaisin ‘on August Saturdays’, joka lauantaisin ‘on every Saturday’, satunnaisin viikonloppuisin ‘on random weekends’ or, e.g., Suomen kunnittain ‘by the municipalities of Finland’, eri maittain ‘by different countries’ ja tietyin aihealueittain ‘by certain thematic areas’. Since these kinds of temporal and distributive expressions look like case-inflected noun phrases, I have playfully called them “dwarf cases” in analogy to the fact that Pluto that was formerly known as a planet but is now called a dwarf planet.
After working on the hazy boundary between derivation and inflection, I have also ended up studying the abessive case in Finnish (rahatta ‘without money’, internetittä ‘without Internet’, etc.) and the so-called t accusative (minut ‘me’, meidät ‘us’, etc.) more thoroughly than before. Even though I personally like to observe and to describe forms and syntactic structures largely by means of descriptive linguistics, the tools of the Language Bank do also offer a lot of opportunities for those who are interested in quantitative analysis.
In addition to the corpora in the Language Bank of Finland, I have also used the corpora of Saami languages and many other Uralic minority languages that have been produced by the language technologists in Tromsø, Norway. The corpora are available via the Korp service maintained by
Publications related to Kielipankki
Salminen, Jutta (2020).
Salminen, Jutta (2018).
Salminen, Jutta (2017).
Salminen, Jutta (2017).
Salminen, Jutta (2017).
More information on the aforementioned resources in Kielipankki
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