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Using Uralic corpora in research
Linguistic corpora in minoritized Uralic languages: where to find them and how to use them for research questions about anything, from phonetics to grammar, from lexicon to sociolinguistics
Did you know that you can investigate prosody, grammar, and sociolinguistics across dozens of minoritized Uralic languages even without speaking them properly? Or that newly available online corpora let us hear the authentic voices of native speakers far more faithfully than traditional textbooks ever could?
This course bridges the gap in awareness regarding corpus-based research of Uralic languages, offering access to rich linguistic data at a time when direct interaction with these communities remains difficult to organize. Online corpora provide an authentic representation of language communities with minimal academic processing or theoretical bias compared to traditional elicitation, grammar books, or dictionaries---a benefit further enhanced when aligned audio is available. The course equips students with practical methodological tools directly applicable to their MA/PhD thesis research.
Students will explore a wide range of research topics across various subdisciplines:
- Phonetics , e.g. clause-final lengthening and pitch contours
- Synchronic grammar , e.g. semantics and usage of grammatical morphemes
- Historical linguistics, e.g. semantic development of cognate morphemes and lexemes across a Uralic branch
- Lexical semantics , e.g. precise meanings and contexts of specific words
- Sociolinguistics , e.g. patterns of code-switching and language borrowings in natural discourse
- Interactional linguistics , e.g. turn-taking in a natural conversation
The course offers an overview of existing Uralic corpora, the principles behind their design, and the methodological tools needed to analyze them; it also features guest presentations by early-career researchers who deal with corpora in their working life. A major focus rests on glossed, i.e. grammatically tagged, corpora that require little prior knowledge of the target language, though lemmatized, translated, and raw monolingual corpora are also covered. Hands-on practical tasks form the core of the learning experience to ensure students gain direct confidence with corpus-based research.
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