Who are you?
I am Krista Ojutkangas, Adjunct Professor and University Lecturer in Finnish language at the University of Turku. I conduct research in the project “Finnish relations: Changes in Finnish relational predicates from the 16th century to the present (FiRe)”, led by and funded by the Research Council of Finland.
What is your research topic?
I am interested in grammar, especially the relationship between linguistic structures and semantics. In particular, I have studied spatial semantics, that is, how different locations are expressed in language, for example through and . I am also interested in the diachronic development of these elements, which I have together with . Furthermore, I am interested in phenomena in Old Literary Finnish, such as or parallelism (cf. Finnish word combinations hyvä ja lysti ’good and funny’, juurtua ja itää ’root and sprout’, kuulla ja ymmärtää ’hear and understand’), which I have studied together with . My latest research topic is , which I have investigated together with Ilmari Ivaska. This project began as an innocent plan for a single article, but preparations are already underway for seasons three and four.
How is your research related to Kielipankki – the Language Bank of Finland?
I have always conducted corpus-based research in various ways, and I am also interested in the methods used in such research. I co-authored a chapter on together with for a book on research methods in linguistics. In that chapter, I provide a very concrete account of my own research approach through illustrative case examples. I usually describe my research as qualitative, but in practice, qualitative and quantitative observations intertwine, and it is not meaningful to draw a strict line between methodological perspectives. In a study I conducted with , quantitative methods have taken center stage thanks to Ilmari’s expertise. Even in this collaboration, I always end up close-reading the data, and I’m persistent when it comes to tapping out a detailed analysis.
Of all the resources available through the Language Bank of Finland, the one closest to me is the . As a bonus, it offers a glimpse into agrarian Finland of the last century. Most of its material is dialect interviews conducted in the 1960s, and almost all of the interviewees were born in the 19th century. Spoken data is also represented by the , but most of my research has focused on written language from different periods. I’ve made use of newspaper, journal, and news material through the , the (also ), and .
The National Library’s collection of newspapers and periodicals reaches the 19th century, and I have gone deeper into history with the corpora of and . In our quantitative research on transitivity, we have also used the . However, given the range of topics and opinions it contains, it’s not a corpus I would necessarily choose for manual, close-reading analysis.
Browsing the resources in the Language Bank feels like stepping into a candy shop for a linguist like me. So many of the corpora are truly tempting and evoke curiosity and new research ideas. Even though I’m not a text researcher by definition, my methods make me appreciate having access to broader context in the data. A close reading of individual occurrences often benefits from seeing what comes before and after them in the text.
Publications
Ivaska, I., & Ojutkangas, K. (2025). . Virittäjä 129(1), 4–30.
Jaakola, M. & Ojutkangas, K. (2023). Teoksessa M. Jaakola ja T. Onikki-Rantajääskö (toim.), The Finnish Case System: Cognitive Linguistic Perspectives, 325–354. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.
Luodonpää-Manni, M. & Ojutkangas, K. (2020). . Teoksessa M. Luodonpää-Manni, M. Hamunen, R. Konstenius, M. Miestamo, U. Nikanne ja K. Sinnemäki (toim.) Kielentutkimuksen menetelmiä I–IV, 412–441. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.
Nummila, K.-M., & Ojutkangas, K. (2013). . Paratagmakonstruktiot 1500–1800‐luvun kirjasuomessa. Sananjalka 55, 73–99.
Ojutkangas, K. (2017). . Virittäjä 121(2), 176–212.
Ojutkangas, K. (2023). . Teoksessa M. Jaakola ja T. Onikki-Rantajääskö (toim.), The Finnish Case System: Cognitive Linguistic Perspectives, 299–324. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.
Corpora
Links
The 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. is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.