Past Research and Achievements

MA thesis: Love changes: A historical semantic comparison between five prototypical senses from 1500 to the present day

I mainly wrote my MA thesis during the summer 1995 and the summer 1996. In between, I did studies in education required of a teacher. In my MA thesis, I investigated five different senses of the English word love and metaphors occurring with the word in several electronic corpora and in Shakespeeare’s Works. For my thesis, I received the second highest grade on a scale of seven. 

PhD thesis: Lovescapes: Changes in prototypical senses and cognitive metaphors since 1500

In my PhD thesis I continued on the subject of my MA thesis, adding a long introduction to cognitive linguistics and corpus methodology, a chapter on the words affection, friendship, passion and charity, a look at the Historical Thesaurus of English, and some more theoretical considerations of the data, which was expanded to more corpora. My thesis consists of six articles which were accepted for publication before April 2003, an introduction, and a discussion and conclusion. Again, I received the second highest grade on a scale of seven.

Work on metaphors of emotion and reason

While I was working on my PhD thesis, Dr. Päivi Koivisto-Alanko and I began comparing conceptual metaphors of emotion and reason. This co-operation resulted in a presentation at the 7th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Santa Barbara, Ca., U.S. in July 2001, and an article in an edited volume, which was published in 2006 (“Sense and sensibility: Rational thought versus emotion in metaphorical language”).

Work at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies: “A welcome experience? Conceptualising and evaluating emotions in English, 1500–2005”

In 2004–2007, I worked as a research fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, focusing on further words for emotions, including anxiety, calmness, excitement, fear, happiness, hate, hope, pride, respect, sadness, and shame. During this time, I wrote six articles on these words and co-authored an article on words for politeness with prof. Terttu Nevalainen. One of the six articles was published in a traditional journal, one in an e-journal, and the rest in edited volumes. In addition, I wrote four book reviews for journals and co-edited the selected proceedings of a conference.

Happiness

At the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, I co-organized a symposium on happiness with Dr. Anne Birgitta Pessi (church and social studies) and Dr. Mikko Salmela (philosophy). The symposium took place on 13 October 2006, and produced a volume for the e-series COLLeGIUM Studies Across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, which was finished in December 2008.

Historical Cognitive Linguistics

In July 2007, I co-organized a workshop, “Historical Linguistics in a Cognitive Framework: From the Present to the Past and Back”, at the 10th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Krakow, Poland, with prof. Margaret E. Winters, Wayne State University, U.S,, Dr. Kathryn Allan, Salford University, U.K. (currently at University College London), and Dr. Päivi Koivisto-Alanko, University of Helsinki, Finland. Prof. Margaret E. Winters, Dr. Kathryn Allan and I have edited a volume on historical cognitive linguistics, based on this workshop.

Virtues and vices

On 6 December 2008, Dr. Sari Kivistö (comparative literature) and I organized a seminar on vices and virtues at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. The language of the seminar was Finnish, and the speakers represented various humanistic disciplines. 

Volume: Approaches to Language and Cognition

In addition, I have edited a volume, Approaches to Language and Cognition, for the e-series Varieng Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, published by the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English, Department of English, University of Helsinki. This volume originated in a symposium held by the Finnish Cognitive Lingustics Association on 25–26 November 2005, titled “Interdisciplinary Themes in Cognitive Language Research”.

Scientific Positions of Trust:

2009-2012 Member of the Executive Committee, Societas Linguistica Europaea

2008–2010 Editor, SKY Journal of Linguistics (SKY = The Linguistic Association of Finland)

2004–2007: FiCLA (Finnish Cognitive Linguistics Association), Member of the Board

December 1998 – February 2002: Honorary secretary of the Modern Language Society in Helsinki