In the Language Bank: Jutta Salminen

Kielipankki – The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Jutta Salminen tells us about her research on the various ways of expressing negation in Finnish.

Who are you?

I am Jutta Salminen (PhD, BMus). I defended my dissertation on the Finnish language at the University of Helsinki in the spring of 2020 and I have been working as a Finnish language lecturer at the University of Greifswald in Germany for more than five years. I am interested in grammar and linguistic meaning – particularly in the expression of negation and also in ambiguity.

What is your research topic?

In my dissertation, I studied the use and interpretations of the verb epäillä (’to doubt, to suspect, to suppose’) and its nominative derivatives epäily and epäilys (’a doubt, a suspicion’), as well as the changes related to the verb during the era of written Finnish. The starting point of the study was the observation that, in present-day Finnish, these lexemes may express that something is considered either probable or unlikely, depending on the context of use. So, I became interested in how a single word can be used in two opposite senses. In addition, these words provided an opportunity for observing how the negation proper (‘it is not (true) that X’) and the so-called evaluative negativity (‘it’s not good that X’, ‘I don’t like X’) relate to each other in language use, since both of these aspects of negativity are included in the meaning potential of the verb and its nominal derivatives.

My current research is focused on the negative polarity items (e.g., kukaan) in Finnish and on what their contexts of use can tell about their grammatical and semantic nature. In English literature, negative polarity items (NPI) have been studied rather extensively (especially in big Indo-European languages), and it is interesting to observe how the Finnish NPIs could relate to these descriptions.

How is your research related to Kielipankki?

In order to study the variation, change and prevalence of different interpretations of linguistic meaning, it is necessary to have access to language material where it is possible to observe and to analyze instances of the language phenomenon under study. For the purpose of my dissertation research, I compiled a data set representing various text genres from several corpora: , , , and . When I began my dissertation study, the Finnish Text Collection was available via the old search interface, , in Kielipankki, and the rest of the corpora (excluding KLK) were accessible via the Kaino service provided by Kotus (Institute for the Languages of Finland). Nowadays, I can use all of the aforementioned corpora via the service in Kielipankki.

I based my comparison of the epäily(s) nouns on the occurrences found in the , which made it possible to examine the use of the words in both the delivered news texts and in the readers’ comments. The linguistic context plays a key role in the perception of the meaning variants of ambiguous words, so that access to the wider context of search results provided by the Language Bank was essential.

My ongoing research on negative polarity items mostly consists of grammatical description. Since grammar tends to change when in use, linguistic data is necessary for this type of research in addition to self-postulated examples, especially when the acceptability and the entrenchment of a particular expression is questionable to some extent. has turned out to be a fruitful source of data for studying the use of the Finnish NPIs.

Publications related to Kielipankki

Salminen, Jutta (2020). . (The meaning and import of epäillä: The polar ambiguity of the Finnish verb epäillä ‘doubt, suspect, suppose’ and its nominal derivatives as a reflection of the semantics of negation and negativity.) Doctoral dissertation. Helsinki: University of Helsinki.

Salminen, Jutta (2018). . Functions of Language 25(2): 259–288.

Salminen, Jutta (2017). . (What does epäillä mean? On the polar meaning variation of the verb epäillä in Modern Finnish.) Virittäjä 121: 4–36.

Salminen, Jutta (2017). . (The polar ambiguity of the Finnish verb epäillä as evidenced through meaning development.) Virittäjä 121: 37–66.

Salminen, Jutta (2017). . (Epäily or epäilys? Shared polysemy and specialised typical uses.) Sananjalka 59: 217–243.

More information on the aforementioned resources in Kielipankki

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