A large part of professor Jaakko Leino’s research comes within the scope of construction grammar. The main idea is that the way in which a person observes the world and language is limited. From streams of speech and written texts we perceive those entities which correspond conceptually to the entities we observe in the world. In the flow of speech we distinguish, for example, words and phrases which correspond to objects that we perceive (apple, Elizabeth, red car), as well as phrases which correspond to events that we perceive (Elizabeth ate apples in the red car).

Leino’s central concern is what the structure of language can tell us about the structure of the mind: what are the habitual expressive tools that we use and what can these reveal about how we perceive the world around us and how we process our understanding of it? He has researched changes in Finnish infinitive constructions and tried to explain those changes through changes in the ways we perceive events. In his latest research, Leino has investigated the ways in which we understand and verbalise time and its passing.