Old literary language

11.09.2021
#research

In the field of old literary language, the corpus of old literary Estonian is compiled, consisting of material from as early as the 13th century, varying from the Estonian sentences found on Livonian Chronicle of Henry, to fiction written by Estonian authors in the late 19th century. Original software has been developed that is used to compile and annotate the corpus. The corpus is used to study phonological, morphological, morphosyntactic and pragmatic phenomena in old literary Estonian. The focus of the research is the development of vocabulary reflected in the old literary language. Diachronic grammar studies deal with language variation and change, including grammaticalization and pragmatization. Among the phenomena, the focus of interest has been the development of conjunctions and infinitive constructions as well as the use of particles, including the development of interrogative particles.

In the framework of historical sociolinguistics, the use of the Estonian literary language has been discussed in different periods, e.g. the stage of the German-influenced Estonian language and the 19th century fusion language.

Research has focused on the Northern Estonian language, there are fewer approaches to the Southern Estonian language. Of the languages that developed in a similar historical situation, the data of the Finnish language, but also Latvian, Livonian and Sorbian are taken into account.

Source publications, voluminous dictionaries and scholarly articles have been published based on the corpus studies.

 

Researchers related to the field

Külli Habicht
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Associate Professor of Estonian Language
Jakobi 2-444
Külli Habicht is an associate professor of Estonian language. Her main fields of research are morphosyntax, inflectional and derivational morphology and Old Literary Estonian. She has also studied pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics. Her research is based on functional, usage-based theory. Külli has researched grammaticalization of adpositions and modal constructions, pragmaticalization of discourse particles and diachronic development of the vocabulary in written Estonian. Her current projects include the compiling of a digital dictionary of Old Literary Estonian and investigating pragmatic particles in different registers. She takes part of the research done by The Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies through the project group PRG341 led by Helle Metslang. She is the co-author of the monography Estonian Inflectional Morphology, four dictionaries of Old Literary Estonian and a gymnasium textbook Language and Society. Külli has been a part of the national Estonian language exam work group and taken part of organising a number of Estonian language Olympiads.
Külli Habicht
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Associate Professor of Estonian Language
Jakobi 2-444
Külli Prillop
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Research Fellow in Estonian Phonology
Jakobi 2-445
Külli Prillop is a research fellow in Estonian phonology. Her first job at the University of Tartu was to develop annotation software for old Estonian texts. Since then she has been interested in grammar and vocabulary of old literary Estonian. Over time this has grown into a broader interest in the history of the Estonian language and the ternary system of Estonian quantity. She has also developed a theory of universal phonological processes and repairs (the PRR theory). Currently, she is compiling the Dictionary of Old Literary Estonian. Külli is also involved in organizing the Estonian Linguistics Olympiad, as well as other linguistic competitions for secondary school students.
Külli Prillop
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Research Fellow in Estonian Phonology
Jakobi 2-445
Liina Pärismaa
doctoral student
Liina Pärismaa is a doctoral student and a junior research fellow of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the variation of different morphosyntactic constructions in the 17th and 18th century North Estonian literary language texts. Liina’s main research interests are old literay estonian, morphosyntax and language change and variation. She participates in a project (PRG341) which is led by Helle Metslang and which studies the linguistic expression of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Liina also writes dictionary entries for the Dictionary of Old Literary Estonian.
Liina Pärismaa
doctoral student
Kadri Muischnek
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of General Linguistics
Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics 0.5 p
Jakobi 2-426

Institute of Computer Science
Chair of Natural Language Processing
Associate Professor in Natural Language Processing 0.5 p
r 3058
Kadri Muischnek is an associate professor in Computational Linguistics. At the moment her research interests include computational syntax: treebanks and parsing. Also she is doing some work with historical text normalization and text genre classification. Her past research interest, to which he hopes to return someday, were multi-word expressions in Estonian.
Kadri Muischnek
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of General Linguistics
Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics 0.5 p
Jakobi 2-426

Institute of Computer Science
Chair of Natural Language Processing
Associate Professor in Natural Language Processing 0.5 p
r 3058
Siim Orasmaa
arvutilingvistika lektor 0,25 k
Siim Orasmaa is a lecturer in Computational Linguistics. He is actively developing Estonian natural language processing toolkit EstNLTK and teaching courses on programming and text analysis tools. His current research focuses on applying natural language processing on historical texts. He has also worked on event and temporal analysis of Estonian texts.
Siim Orasmaa
arvutilingvistika lektor 0,25 k