Projects

(In order of recency)

Evidentiality in social interaction: a cross-linguistic perspective

Linguistic evidentials are grammatical markers of information source, including sensory evidence, inference or hearsay. In this project, I will uncover similarities and differences in how evidentials are used across languages in carrying out social actions, such as expressing one’s authority or responsibility. I will compare linguistic evidentials which occur in conversational structures (e.g. in question-answer sequences) by using methods from linguistic typology and Conversation Analysis (CA). The focus of my project is on lesser-documented languages of Eurasia and the Americas, for which conversational data is available in endangered language archives.

 

Make it count: new advances in understanding grammatical number

Grammatical number (singular, plural etc.) is central to the structure of languages, yet we know fairly little about the factors that shape number systems. Of particular interest are systems with splits (some nouns mark number one way, other nouns a different way) and systems with multiple number forms (beyond a binary, usually singular/plural, opposition). This project investigates the basis of number-marking patterns: what is the role of semantics (the meaning of words) and pragmatics (the usage of words, incl. their cultural context)? We will develop a new, stimuli-based fieldwork methodology to answer these questions and apply it to gather data in a sample of Brittonic and Cushitic languages.

 

ARC Discovery Project “The Building Blocks of Meaning: A linguistic approach”

  • PI: Cliff Goddard (Griffith University). Participants: Zhengdao Ye (Australian National University), David Bullock (University of Washington), Ulla Vanhatalo.
  • 2021-2023, funded by the Australian Research Council.

 

At the Core of Easy Language

  • PI: Ulla Vanhatalo. Participants: Leealaura Leskelä and Eliisa Uotila.
  • 2020-2022 (2023), funded by the Kone foundation.
  • The project runs the Klaara-network; the network’s webpages.

Selkokielen ytimessä (At the Core of Easy Language) project investigates what Easy Finnish is like – and what it should be like. Sub-projects produce new knowledge on spoken Easy Language, means of explanations in Easy Language, vocabulary, and Easy Language in healthcare. The project was responsible for running the Klaara network in 2020-2022.

 

Individuation in the grammar: singulatives at the intersection of morphology and semantics

  • PI: Silva Nurmio. Researchers: Rahel T. Dires, Matilda Carbo.
  • 2020–2023, funded by Helsinki University three-year grants
  • Project’s website.

The singulative is a category that denotes an individual or a unit and is formed by adding a morphological marker to a non-unit-denoting base, e.g. a plural, mass noun or a form not marked for number at all. An example is Welsh gwenyn ‘bees’ (unmarked plural, often also called ‘collective’), SGT gwenyn-en ‘a bee’. We are building a database of singulatives cross-linguistically and exploring three main topics: the morphology of singulatives (what kinds of bases and markers do we find?), semantics and usage (why are nouns of certain semantic categories marked overtly for singular meaning?) and diachrony (how and why does singulative marking arise?).

 

Negation in Clause Combining: Typological and usage-based perspectives (NiCC)

  • PI: Matti Miestamo. Researchers: Olli Silvennoinen, Chingduang Yurayong, Ksenia Shagal (LMU München).
  • 2020-2024, funded by the Academy of Finland
  • Project’s website.

The project studies the expression of negation in complex sentences from a broadly comparative typological perspective. In addition to the world-wide comparison of languages, the project focuses on a number of languages and language groups in northern Eurasia. Parallel to the comparative approach, the topic is addressed with the methods of usage-based linguistics, looking for correlations between cross-linguistic and language-internal variation.

 

Linguistic Adaptation: Typological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives to Language Variation

The project Linguistic Adaptation combines typological and sociolinguistic approaches to language variation for researching whether language structures are affected similarly across languages by the sociolinguistic environments in which they are and have been learned and used. We develop new methods for comparing sociolinguistic environments and linguistic structures to one another across languages and new analyses that enable researching linguistic adaptation in principled ways. The ultimate aim is to answer the question whether languages adapt to sociolinguistic environment in similar ways across the very diverse languages of the world.