Description of research and teaching

Overview

I am professor of quantitative and comparative linguistics at the University of Helsinki. My research concerns primarily large-scale comparative research of the world's languages but also corpus linguistics and comparative sociolinguistics. I have researched, for instance, case marking, word order, grammatical gender, linguistic complexity, language and religion, and methodology in typology. I teach widely on general linguistic topics, ranging from language typology and language evolution to sociolinguistics, language contact, and statistics in linguistics. I supervise master's theses and PhD dissertations mostly related to my research interests and expertise but also more widely.

I currently direct the ERC-funded project "Linguistic Adaptation" (2019-2023). See more information about the project by clicking the link.

Research

• Language typology and universals
• Core argument marking
• Statistical methods in typology
• Language complexity
• Adaptation of language structures
• Sociolinguistic typology
• Language and religion

Courses taught

• Articulatory phonetics
• Evolution of speech and language
• Introduction to general linguistics
• Introduction to language typology
• Introduction to syntax
• History of linguistics and current fields of research
• Language Contact
• Linguistic meaning, usage and context
• Phonology and morphology
• Quantitative typology
• Quantitative methods in linguistics
• Research methods in linguistics
• Sociolinguistics