I wrote my dissertation on the Finnish word for ‘and’, ja. And I got to explain why on more than few occasions. One consequence of this is that one of the requirements in my MA thesis seminar is to formulate your topic so that you can explain it in one sentence to people who ask about it in a café or bar.

Studying ja means studying something that holds a text together. This is a topic that I have approached in various ways through my academic career in speech as well as texts written by a variety of writers. In the past few years, I have particularly concentrated on texts by second language users of Finnish: how they are constructed, how they cohere, and how the writer’s perspective is expressed.

The Academy of Finland funded a project that I led and that ended a few years ago, called Contexts of Subordination, in which we studied the hierarchical relations between sentences and parts of texts from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics, language typology and interaction. There is now an edited volume based on the project: Contexts of Subordination. Cognitive, typological and discourse perspectives (edited by Laura Visapää, Jyrki Kalliokoski and Helena Sorva).

I work as the Finnish co-ordinator for the TextLink network, funded by the EU’s COST programme, which brings together researchers working on discourse relations, corpus linguistics and language technology. The aim of the network is to gather information on the ways in which European languages express relations between parts of text and on existing theoretical frameworks and language corpora, and to develop annotation tools so that they can best describe the diversity of languages and their relations, and the means to preserve the coherence in texts.