People

Project members

Matti Miestamo, PI, Professor of General Linguistics

A picture of Matti MiestamoMatti Miestamo’s main research interest is in the typology of negation. He is the author of Standard Negation: The Negation of Declarative Verbal Main Clauses in a Typological Perspective  (Mouton de Gruyter 2005) and editor of Negation in Uralic Languages (Benjamins 2015). In NiCC, his main focus is in the large-scale typological studies of negation in dependent clauses and in other clause-combining contexts. For more information on his work on negation and beyond, visit his website or his profile at the University of Helsinki Research Portal.

Ksenia Shagal, PhD, post-doc

A picture of Ksenia ShagalKsenia Shagal is a typologist specializing in non-finite verb forms and subordination. Her doctoral dissertation was the first large-scale typological study of participles based on data from more than 100 genealogically and geographically diverse languages. In NiCC, she focuses mainly on non-finite negation in the languages of Northern Eurasia, which she studies from a typological, areal, and contact perspective. She also contributes to other parts of the project.

Olli Silvennoinen, PhD, post-doc

A picture of Olli Silvennoinen

Olli Silvennoinen is a corpus linguist working in the intersection of English and general linguistics. He defended his PhD on contrastive negation in 2019. In NiCC, he carries the main responsibility for the corpus studies but participates also in the typological parts of the project. Silvennoinen will be working on the project as a post-doc in 2022–2024. For more information, see his website.

Chingduang Yurayong, PhD, post-doc

Chingduang Yurayong (a.k.a. Jaeng) is a historical linguist with a broad interest in the structural development and contact of languages in various microareas across Eurasia. His doctoral dissertation deals with the emergence of postposed demonstratives in a millennium-long contact among Finnic and North Russian dialects. His research focus in NiCC concerns diachronic and areal aspects of negation in complex clauses. He also contributes to the typological and usage-based parts of the project. For more information on his work, see his profile at the University of Helsinki Research Portal.

Héloïse Calame, research assistant

Héloïse Calame is a research assistant in the NiCC project. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from the University of Berne, Switzerland and is currently studying General Linguistics in the Master’s programme of Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities. She is especially interested in morphosyntax and endangered languages.

Alumni

Karoliina Mäkilähde, research assistant

Karoliina Mäkilähde was a research assistant in the NiCC project in May–November 2023. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from the University of Helsinki and wrote her thesis on double negation. She is currently studying General Linguistics in the Master’s programme of Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities. Beyond the study of negation, she is interested in Latin and Ancient Greek.

Anni Pänkäläinen, research assistant

Anni Pänkäläinen worked as a research assistant in the NiCC project in May–November 2023. As a student of General Linguistics she is currently working on her thesis in the Master’s programme of Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities. Her interests include, for example, language typology, the origins of language, and sound symbolism.

Visitors

Mansour Shabani, visiting researcher, 2023
A picture of Manshour Shabani

Mansour Shabani is an Associate Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Guilan in Iran. At the moment, he is a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki working on ‘Negation in Caspian Languages’. His research interests include Syntax (Ellipsis, Split Topicalization, Reverse Ezafe, among others), Iranian Languages and Dialects, Linguistics and Language Education. For more information on his works on these interests, visit his profile at the University of Guilan.

Giacomo Bucci, visiting researcher, 2023

Giacomo Bucci is a PhD student in historical linguistics, with a special interest in the morphosyntax of early and medieval Germanic languages. His current PhD project at Gent University (FWO fellowship) is dedicated to the description of the genitive of negation phenomenon in early Germanic varieties, especially from a cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective (more information at his profile at the Gent University research portal)

Alena Blinova (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), 2021–2022

Alena Blinova is a lexical and syntactic typologist. Her PhD study focuses on the semantic field of throwing and its neighbours, and a previous project she worked on together with Ksenia Shagal concerns bivalent verbs in the Uralic languages. In NiCC, she works with typological data on the languages of the Volga-Kama region.