WORK IN PROGRESS
Keith Battarbee ’s research interests lie in the sociology and politics of language, with particular reference to multilingual situations involving English, and more generally to language as social practice in its historical and social contexts. He is currently exploring the implications of multiple-language policies in a comparative study of three jurisdictions with eleven co-official languages: the Northwest Territories in Canada (2002-), the Republic of South Africa (1993-), and the European Union (1995-2004).
Ruth Carroll is an Academy of Finland research fellow (2009-2014). She is writing a monograph, provisionally titled "And othere notefull thinges": A diachronic account of English extender tags. Extender tags (and so forth, or such-like, et cetera) occur in many languages, but previous research has tended to concentrate on a limited set of fixed phrases in the language of the present day. Ruth’s research incorporates historical pragmatics, phraseology, and corpus linguistics, with the goals of exploring the nature of extender tags as semi-fixed / semi-lexicalized phrases, and identifying their functions and distribution.
Risto Hiltunen ’s research relates to English in the medieval period, history of English, legal language studies, and discourse studies. He is particularly interested in the (re)construction of discourse in historical (con)texts. His current work deals with the transcripts of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. Together with Matti Peikola (see below), he is a member in an international team of editors preparing a new scholarly edition of the entire documentary material of the Salem trials. In his other work on this subject he is investigating the discourse features of the Salem documents with a special reference to the role of the participants in various communicative events of the trials.
Tuomas Huttunen is engaged in a dissertation project titled "Ethics of Multicultural Representation in the Fiction of Amitav Ghosh". He is concentrating on some recurrent themes in Ghosh’s narratives: the creation of connections across politically or culturally constructed divisions; the representation of communities/nations as ‘heterogeneous wholes’; the ethical representation of inter-human relationships vs. ‘discourse as power’; poststructuralist epistemology vs. idealist/humanist one; and the utopian possibility of ‘transcending language’ into a space free of the power politics distributed by language. The main research problem of Tuomas’s thesis is the tension between what could be characterized as a politically charged postmodernist emphasis on textuality and difference on the one hand and an ethical approach towards other human beings on the other.
Johanna Karhukorpi ’s primary field of interest is Lingua Franca English - English used as a language of communication between speakers of different mother tongues. Her research concentrates especially on electronic lingua franca discourse and its pragmatic aspects. Johanna’s main interest in her post-graduate work is repair and its functions in lingua franca e-mail discussions. Her general research interests are thus multidisciplinary; covering discourse analysis, conversation analysis, lingua franca research and computer-mediated communication.
Lydia Kokkola ’s research project, Silence and Sexuality: Reticent responses to adolescent sexuality, examines the ways in which the social category of adolescence has been constructed. Adolescence occupies a liminal space separated from both adulthood and childhood. The boundaries of this space are under constant negotiation, as are the markers. Sexuality is a key element in defining the limits of childhood. A better understanding of adolescence as a social phenomenon can be achieved by studying how adolescent sexuality is presented in literature written for adults and teenagers. Lydia’s main focus is on how patterns of communication reflect the underlying power structures.
Janne Korkka ’s primary field of research is Canadian literature. He is particularly interested in the narrative representation of place and the problem of constructing textual images of the Other (or alterity), particularly in narratives motivated by history. In the Canadian context, the latter question is most often discussed in connection with the First Nations. However, the impact of occupying a marginalised role within Canadian society has been felt by many other cultural minorities as well. Janne is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on the Western Canadian author Rudy Wiebe. Wiebe is best known for his monumental reconstructions of Prairie history, and particularly his literary investment in First Nations and Mennonite experience.
Joel Kuortti 's current research work is especially on applications of post-colonial and transnational theories on literature and other cultural products. His works in progress include e.g. articles on post-colonial translation, transnational identity, transcultural nation, Indian women’s writing in English, and Salman Rushdie’s visual imagination. He is a co-organizer of the research project Western Literatures in Flux: Challenges of Gendered Transnational Literature and Migrant Aesthetic, and a member of the Nordic Network for Literary Transculturation Studies. He is co-editor of Kulttuurintutkimus – the Finnish cultural studies journal, and associate editor of The Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies.
Pekka Lintunen ’s primary research interest is contrastive English phonetics. He is especially interested in the pronunciation of English by Finnish learners. Pekka is also interested in Second Language Acquisition and foreign language teaching and learning. In particular, he has done research on pronunciation teaching methods and has especially concentrated on the use of phonemic transcription in EFL teaching (which was the topic of his doctoral dissertation). Pekka is now studying the contextual variation of certain pronunciation problems (i.e. which phonetic contexts cause problems most frequently?), differences in pronunciation problems when trying to emulate British or American English and student attitudes towards pronunciation models and varieties. Pekka has also published on students’ familiarity with basic grammatical terms and concepts.
Raita Merivirta-Chakrabarti ’s area of research is Indian literature in English, particularly the post-Midnight’s Children novel-as-history trend of the 1980s and 1990s. She finds the history-fiction interface of pivotal interest in those novels that both examine and evaluate the history of 20th-century India as well as problematize Indian historiography. In her doctoral dissertation on representations of twentieth-century Indian history in post-Emergency Indian novels in English, Raita approaches her theme from an interdisciplinary perspective combining literary criticism with history and historiography. Her passion for films is reflected in her other main research interest, modern Irish history, especially the revolutionary period from 1916 to 1922, and its portrayal in (Irish) films.
Riia Milovanov ’s doctoral dissertation focuses on cognitive neuroscience, more precisely, the cortical brain activity in relation to phonetic and music stimuli processing in early adolescence and adulthood. Moreover, the relationship between language skills and musical aptitude is investigated. She uses event-related potential recordings in a mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm to determine whether the cortical networks in the musically talented subjects represent the important sound features more readily than other testees. Riia is also interested in developing English teaching methods, especially for those students with learning deficiencies, such as dyslexia.
Matti Peikola ’s research addresses the manuscript context of historical texts. He seeks to combine the use of linguistic, textual, and codicological/paleographical evidence in the study of patterns of production and transmission of manuscript texts. His work draws methodological inspiration especially from quantitative codicology and recent advances in the profiling of medieval English scribes. Matti currently employs this approach to two sets of texts: the late medieval manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible and legal documents associated with the Salem witch-hunt of 1692. Together with Risto Hiltunen, he is involved in the international Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project.
Päivi Pietilä ’s main area of interest is Second Language Acquisition and also Second Language Attrition. In recent years, her research has focused on speaking skills of advanced learners, particularly the role and development of pragmatic competence. She is currently investigating the relationship between lexical and grammatical competence in the English of advanced learners and the use of lexical strategies in written production.
Hanna Salmi 's main area of interest is the history of English, in particular the medieval period. She is working on a dissertation project provisionally titled "Text-organising devices and interaction in some early Middle English dialogues".
Janne Skaffari is currently concerned with contact linguistics and the history of English, particularly the transition from Old into Middle English. The vocabulary of English is essentially the outcome of language contacts between speakers of English and of other languages. The onset of the development from a purely Germanic to a lexically mixed language dates to the twelfth century, when the lexical consequences of English contacts with Norman French, and prior to that, the Scandinavian language of Vikings, began to emerge in vernacular texts. To explore this period, Janne combines a broader, corpus-based approach with detailed case studies of the lexis of selected Early Middle English texts. He is also interested in code-switching, language contact situations and other sociolinguistic issues from the Middle Ages to the present.
Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen ’s fields of interest are discourse linguistics and pragmatics, applied to both historical and present-day material. Her current research project deals with mediated interaction in English from carriers and snail-mail to the internet and e-mail. At the moment Sanna-Kaisa’s research on historical material is concerned with the pragmatics of the word ‘friend’ in early English correspondence, while her studies on present-day material focus on computer-mediated discourse. More specifically, Sanna-Kaisa is looking at mailing-list and message-board discussions from the perspective of negotiation of opinions, and chat from the perspective of cohesion and coherence.
Ellen Valle ’s research concerns epistolary practices in the 18th and 19th century in natural history, using methods of discourse analysis and pragmatics: how botanists and zoologists, plant hunters and explorers used letters to disseminate and share information about new species, at the same time constructing not only scientific knowledge but also a center/periphery division between England and the colonies. Ellen is now studying two episodes in the correspondence of Charles Darwin. The first covers the Beagle voyage: in his letters, he gradually transforms himself from a young and enthusiastic amateur into a professional scientist. The second is the ‘Cirripedia’ episode, in which Darwin wrote over a hundred letters to different people requesting specimens or information. The way he addresses recipients of different social or scientific status casts an interesting light on the pragmatics of politeness in the mid-19th century.
Elina Valovirta ’s PhD project deals with sexuality and affectivity in Caribbean women’s writing read through a model of feminist reader theory. In reading authors such as Erna Brodber, Edwidge Danticat, Shani Mootoo and Opal Palmer Adisa, the general theoretical question has to do with the contextual, mediated nature of reading. How are meanings produced in a reading situated in a cross-cultural, affective and ethical feminist dimension of the reading process as interactive and dialogic? Second, what kinds of meanings of sexuality and the emotions related to it are produced in such a reading? Third, how does a white, Western feminist reader become constructed in a cross-cultural reading, and what ethical processes are at stake in this enterprise? In addition to feminist theory and postcolonial literature, Valovirta is interested in feminist pedagogy, as she also teaches courses at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of Turku.