About me

I am a linguist, specializing in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and lexicography. I completed my PhD degree in linguistics in 2014 at Simon Fraser University, Canada (SFU). I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Germany at the University of Potsdam (Uni Potsdam) and thereafter at Humboldt University of Berlin (HU Berlin). Presently, I am working as a university lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland (ÅAU).  I also hold a Title of Docent in English Discourse Analysis at the University of Turku, Finland.

My research primarily concentrates on topics in discourse and pragmatics, such as discourse relations (i.e., relations between propositions or speech acts) and discourse signals (e.g., discourse connective if for Condition relations). In my PhD dissertation, I investigated how discourse relations are indicated by a wide variety of signals (such as lexical, semantic, syntactic, and genre features, in addition to discourse connectives). The outcome of the project was a corpus of discourse signals, called the RST Signalling Corpus. In the past, I worked in areas such as sentiment analysis, discourse parsing, and lexicography. More recently, I (and my former colleague, Dr. Markus Egg) investigated the role of continuity or discontinuity (along dimensions like time, space, action, modality, or speech act) in the interpretation discourse relations.

Presently, I and my colleague, Dr. Izabela Czerniak, are investigating the syntactic, semantic, and discourse functions of relative clauses in L2 learners’ corpora of academic texts. A major goal of our inquiry is to examine whether/how the production of English relative clauses is influenced by the L2 learners’ native language background, such as Finnish, Swedish, Italian, or Urdu (and also, systematic typological variation according to language families, if any). Find more information about this project HERE.

Research interests

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: explicit and implicit discourse Relations, signalling in discourse, continuity in discourse, discourse parsing, sentiment analysis

CORPUS LINGUISTICS: corpus annotation, corpus development, annotation evaluation

LEXICOGRAPHY: discourse connective lexicons, bilingual dictionaries, translation of technical terms

SYNTAX: Relative clauses, information structuring, typology

Theoretical Frameworks

Rhetorical Structure Theory, PDTB framework, Appraisal Theory, Systemic Functional Linguistics

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