Large text collections, called corpora, have totally changed the way research is carried out in linguistics. Language production is now available to researchers in electronic format. Although corpora cover only a tiny part of total language usage, they enable much more thorough analyses of language than was earlier possible. In 2003 Finnish researchers received Integrum, a unique Russian database of 50 billion words, in a very unusual way, as part of the programme of compensation for Soviet Union debts to Finland. Thus, it was free of charge for the university. Afterwards, Russia paid the remainder of the debts in cash, and Finnish universities now have to buy a yearly license to utilise the database.

Integrum is not a linguistic database in the proper sense of the word. It is an enormous collection of texts. The most valuable part of the database is a bank of more than 3000 newspapers and journals. The texts are not annotated, but the search facilities are rich. At our department, we have created special techniques for more effective use of the material. The first large-scale study was about Russian’s exceptional “natural force” construction, which is a sort of combination between active and passive voices. Some ten scholars before us had tried to discover the conditions of using the construction. The construction, as such, is quite normal and productive in contemporary Russian and but rather rare in use. Consequently, in previous studies the same 25 instances were examined. After we received the Integrum database, we started to create a search method for finding more instances. As a result, we managed to collect 3000 examples. On that basis, we were able to make the first proper analysis of the usage of the construction:

• Арто Мустайоки & Михаил Копотев. Лодку унесло ветром: условия и контексты употребления русской «стихийной» конструкции [Lodku uneslo vetrom: conditions and contexts of the use of Russian impersonal constructions involving an external force] // Russian Linguistics 2005: 1, 1–38.

The figurative use of the conctruction is analysed in the article below:

• Арто Мустайоки. Каким ветром его занесло сюда?: употребление русской «стихийной» конструкции в переносном значении [Kakim vetrom ego zaneslo sjuda?: The use of Russian impersonal constructions involving an external force in a figurative meaning] // Жизнь языка и язык жизни: Festschrift in honor of E.D. Suleimenova / Н.Ж. Шаймерденова. Алматы: Казак университетi, 2005, 57–71.

Subsequently, we have also studied other grammatical issues, among others, the second genitive with a -u ending, a number of names for berries and fruit and Russian conative verbs.

• Арто Мустайоки. «Победительная тема», или Новый взгляд на конативные предикаты в системе аспектуальных значений [“The winning theme”, or a new view on conative predicates in the system of aspectual meanings] // Язык. Личность. Текст. Сборник статей к 70-летию Т.М. Николаевой / В.Н. Топоров. Москва: Языки славянских культур, 2005, 224–236.
• Арто Мустайоки. Грамматическое число у названий фруктов, овощей и ягод в русском и финском языках [Grammatical number in the names of fruits, vegetables and berries in Russian and Finnish] // Языковая личность: текст, словарь, образ мира. Москва: Изд. РУДН, 2006, 447-463.
• Арто Мустайоки & Oльга Пуссинен. Почему народу много, или новые наблюдения над употреблением второго родительного падежа в современном русском языке [Why narodu mnogo: new observations on the use of the second genitive in Russian] // Integrum: точные методы и гуманитарные науки / Г. Никипорец-Такигава, М.: Летний сад, 2006, 50-75.
• Арто Мустайоки. Aспектуальность и игра в теннис [Aspectuality and playing tennis] // Логический анализ языка. Концептуальные поля игры / Н.Д. Арутюнова. М.: Индрик, 2006, 443-456.
• Арто Мустайоки & Oльга Пуссинен. Об экспансии глагольной приставки ПО- в современном русском языке [Expansion of the prefix PO in the contemporary Russian] // Инструментарий русистики: корпусные подходы (= Slavica Helsingiensia 34). Helsinki, 2008, 247-275.

A large text collection like Integrum can also be used in studies of other kinds. I have also addressed questions such as “what can science, religion and economics do?”, “what do the Russians think of modernisation?” and “why do people pretend to understand?”

A general description of studies using Integrum

With Mikhail Kopotev, I have also touched on the theory of corpus linguistics.

• Арто Мустайоки & Михаил Копотев. Принципы создания Хельсинкского аннотированного корпуса русских текстов (ХАНКО) в сети Интернет [Principles of creation of the Helsinki annotated corpus of Russian texts] // Научно-техническая информация. Сер. 2: Информационные системы и процессы. № 6: Корпусная лингвистика в России, 2003, 33-37.
• Михаил Копотев & Арто Мустайоки. Современная корпусная русистика [Contemporary Russian corpus linguistics] // Инструментарий русистики: корпусные подходы (= Slavica Helsingiensia 34). Helsinki, 2008, 7-24.
• Works by Mikhail Kopotev
• In one of his papers Mikhail Kopotev discusses my early (1973) idea of the creation of a “frequency grammar.”