Syntax and morphology
Our researchers investigate the rich morphosyntax of Estonian and other Finno-Ugric languages, which enriches our knowledge of the structure of Estonian as well as the general theory of language by introducing patterns and behavior only visible in morphologically complex languages. We are interested in variation in derivational and inflectional morphology and syntactic phenomena like word order and argument structure. Various approaches are used in the Institute to investigate morphosyntactic phenomena, including usage-based and other functional approaches, frequently based on quantitative corpus studies, experiments or qualitative research.
Researchers related to the field
Liina Lindström
Professor of Modern Estonian
Jakobi 2-443
+372 513 8446 (8446)
Liina Lindström is a professor of Modern Estonian. Her main research interests are related to language variation and syntax of Estonian from the usage-based, functionalist perspective. Main focus of her research is on syntactic variation in Estonian and the role of different forces behind it. She has been in charge of compiliing corpora of Estonian, especially the Corpus of Estonian Dialects, and also uses mostly corpus data in her research and applies quantitative and qualitative methods on this data. She is a head of the Centre for Digital Humanities and Information Society and tries to push using digital humanities methods in the humanities more widely at the University of Tartu. Currently she is a leader of the project Interdsciplinary Corpus of Seto and is involved in other projects, such as teenager language corpus.
Liina Lindström
Professor of Modern Estonian
Jakobi 2-443
+372 513 8446 (8446)
Gerson Stefan Klumpp
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Head of Department, Professor of Finno-Ugric Languages, Programme Director for Estonian and Finno-Ugric Languages
Jakobi 2-415
+372 737 6537
Gerson Klumpp joined the University of Tartu in 2011 as a professor of Finno-Ugric languages. His research interests include Samoyed languages, in particular the extinct Kamas language, Permic languages, and pragmatics and information structure as motivators of morphosyntactic structures, such as differential object marking in Komi dialects, as well as language change. He is currently leading a project on the grammar of discourse particles in minor Finno-Ugric languages. Gerson loves to work with older text collections and contrast them with contemporary language data. He is also participating in projects dealing with parish court records and other Estonian texts.
Gerson Stefan Klumpp
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Head of Department, Professor of Finno-Ugric Languages, Programme Director for Estonian and Finno-Ugric Languages
Jakobi 2-415
+372 737 6537
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
Helle Metslang
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Professors emeriti, Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Professor emeritus
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Professor emeritus 0.75 p
Jakobi 2-424
Helle Metslang is Professor Emerita at the University of Tartu, Adjunct Professor of the University of Helsinki and of the University of Oulu, Member of Academia Europaea, of the AcademiaNet, of the Estonian Language Board.She has worked as Professor at the universities of Tartu, Tallinn and Helsinki. Her research interests include morphosyntax, pragmatics, language dynamics, language variation, historical sociolinguistics, contrastive linguistics and typology. She is co-author of Estonian reference grammars and Editor in Chief of the book series "Eesti keele varamu" (Estonian repository), PI of the project “Pragmatics overwrites grammar: subjectivity and intersubjectivity in different registers and genres of Estonian“ (PRG341).
Helle Metslang
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Professors emeriti, Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Professor emeritus
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Professor emeritus 0.75 p
Jakobi 2-424
Virve-Anneli Vihman
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Deputy Head of Development
Jakobi 2-416
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Applied Linguistics
Professor of Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-416
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Centre for Multilingualism
Head of Centre
+372 5349 6820
Virve Vihman is Associate Professor of Psycholinguistics. She investigates language acquisition and the structure of Estonian from a Usage-Based, functionalist perspective. Her research has investigated mono- and bilingual acquisition of morphosyntax in a comparative perspective and the linguistic choices made by speakers, based on corpus data and experimental approaches. She is the PI of a project compiling an Estonian teenage language corpus of spoken and texted language use. She teaches MA courses in bilingualism, language acquisition and psycholinguistics.
Virve-Anneli Vihman
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Deputy Head of Development
Jakobi 2-416
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Applied Linguistics
Professor of Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-416
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Centre for Multilingualism
Head of Centre
+372 5349 6820
Kadri Muischnek
Institute of Computer Science
Chair of Natural Language Processing
Associate Professor in Natural Language Processing 0.5 p
r 3058
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Centre for Digital Humanities
Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics 0.5 p
Jakobi 2-424
Kadri Muischnek is an associate professor in Computational Linguistics. At the moment her research interests include computational syntax: treebanks and parsing. She is also doing some work with historical text normalization and text genre classification. Her past research interest, to which she hopes to return someday, were multi-word expressions in Estonian.
Kadri Muischnek
Institute of Computer Science
Chair of Natural Language Processing
Associate Professor in Natural Language Processing 0.5 p
r 3058
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Centre for Digital Humanities
Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics 0.5 p
Jakobi 2-424
Tiit Hennoste
Department of Estonian
Laboratory of Spoken and Computer Mediated Communication
Research Fellow in Spoken Language and Conversation Analysis
Jakobi 2-407
Tiit Hennoste is an associate professor of Estonian, whose main research field is spoken Estonian and spoken interaction. He has studied the syntax of spoken language (especially self-repair), questions and answers, problem solving in communication, particles, as well as the typology of varieties of Estonian and the use of varieties in different time periods. He has also led the compilation of the spoken language corpora and managed corpora projects. In addition, he has studied the linguistic features of instant messaging and the use of spoken language in fiction.
Tiit Hennoste
Department of Estonian
Laboratory of Spoken and Computer Mediated Communication
Research Fellow in Spoken Language and Conversation Analysis
Jakobi 2-407
Fedor Rozhanskiy
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Associate Professor of Finno-Ugric Languages
Jakobi 2-410
Fedor Rozhanskiy is Associate Professor of Finno-Ugric Languages at the Department of Finno-Ugric Languages. In the late 1980-s and 1990-s he worked mainly with West African languages (first of all Songhay). Since 2000, he investigates Finno-Ugric languages. His research is focused on description and documentation of Votic and Ingrian, and on some particular topics in other languages of this group (e.g. in Mari and Komi). His research interests include morphophonology, experimental phonetics, morphology, syntax, intragenetic typology, theory and typology of reduplication, ideophones, language contact, borrowings, language variation, endangered languages, and field linguistics.
Fedor Rozhanskiy
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Associate Professor of Finno-Ugric Languages
Jakobi 2-410
Helen Plado
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in Estonian Language 0.2 p
Jakobi 2-439
Helen Plado is a research fellow and a lecturer of Estonian. Her main research interests are language variation and change. The main focus of her research is on syntax (mainly complex sentences), but in ddition to this, she has studied other morphosyntactic issues. Her research focuses on Estonian and Võro, latter of which she has studied on sociolinguistic perspective as well. Helen Plado uses mainly corpus data, but also the data collected during field work and linguistic experiments. She is the editor of the Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics.
Helen Plado
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in Estonian Language 0.2 p
Jakobi 2-439
Miina Norvik
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Associate Professor of Finnic Languages and Language Typology
Jakobi 2-445
Miina Norvik is a researcher of the Finnic languages at the Department of Finno-Ugric Studies. In her research she has mainly focused on the study of grammatical features in Livonian and other Finnic languages (e.g. Karelian, Veps). First and foremost, she is interested in morphological and syntactic features (e.g. the expression of tense, change-of-state, degrees of comparison), which she has mainly studied from the functional-typological perspective.
Since 2018 she has been working more generally with the Uralic languages by developing the typological database of the Uralic languages (UraTyp). This has given her the possibility to participate in international and interdisciplinary research groups (AGL and BEDLAN).
Until March 2023 she is also affiliated with the Uppsala University, where she is carrying out her post-doc project Continuity and change in Finnic language structure in the light of language contact.
Since 2011 she has been involved in organising the linguistic olympiads to introduce linguistic diversity among school children.
Miina Norvik
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Associate Professor of Finnic Languages and Language Typology
Jakobi 2-445
Raili Pool
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Applied Linguistics
Lecturer in Estonian as a Foreign Language
Jakobi 2-437
+372 737 5307
Raili Pool is an associate professor in Estonian as a foreign language. Her field of research is the acquisition of Estonian as a second language. Her research focuses on the structure of Estonian language, especially the acquisition of syntax, but she has also studied the oral communication between an Estonian learner and a native speaker. She is also interested in contrastive grammar and learners' dictionaries and has compiled a verb valency dictionary for Estonian language learners. In co-operation with the Institute of the Estonian Language, she researches the grammar competence of Estonian language learners at different language proficiency levels and compiles descriptions of grammar competetence.
Raili Pool
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Applied Linguistics
Lecturer in Estonian as a Foreign Language
Jakobi 2-437
+372 737 5307
Eva Saar
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Research Fellow in Finnic Languages
Jakobi 2-413
+372 737 5422
Eva Saar is a research fellow in Finnic languages at the Department of Finno-Ugric Studies and the coordinator of the Centre for South-Estonian Language and Cultural Studies. His research focuses mainly on the minor Finnic languages spoken in Russia, but also on South Estonian. Her research interests include language history, phonology, morphology, and morphosyntax of the Finnic languages, as well as personal names and onomastics in general. Since 1997, she has carried out fieldwork in Votic, Ingriani, Lydic, Veps and Karelian language areas in Russia, as well as in the Mulgi, Seto and Võro language areas in Estonia.
Since 2018, she is involved in compiling the typological database of Uralic languages (UraTyp). She is currently leading the project "Vepsian way of life and worldview in the 21st century", and manages the compilation of a Seto (South Estonian) dictionary.
Eva Saar
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Research Fellow in Finnic Languages
Jakobi 2-413
+372 737 5422
Joshua Wilbur
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Centre for Digital Humanities
Lecturer in Digital Linguistics
Jakobi 2-417
Joshua Wilbur is currently Visiting Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the Center for Digital Humanities and Information Society and associated with the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics. He holds a PhD in General Linguistics, and has a research focus on documentary linguistics, mophophonology, syntax, corpus linguistics, lexicography and language technology, especially concerning Pite Saami, a critically endangered Uralic language of Sweden.
Joshua Wilbur
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Centre for Digital Humanities
Lecturer in Digital Linguistics
Jakobi 2-417
Piia Taremaa
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of General Linguistics
Research Fellow in General Linguistics
Jakobi 2-446
Piia Taremaa is a research fellow who defended her PhD thesis in linguistics at the University of Tartu in 2017. Situating herself in the framework of cognitive linguistics, her research interests include semantics, morphosyntax and constructional variation. She has a particular interest in the expression of space and motion, and she is also interested in reference, spoken language perception and academic writing. In her studies, she applies corpus and experimental methods, and combines quantitative research methods with qualitative ones.
Piia Taremaa
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of General Linguistics
Research Fellow in General Linguistics
Jakobi 2-446
Kaidi Lõo
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-405
Kaidi Lõo is a research fellow in Psycholinguistics. Her field of research is lexical processing, which deals with the production and understanding of language at the word level and it examines how words are stored in the mental lexicon. More specifically, Kaidi is interested in how word’s structure and usage words affect language processing. In her work, she applies experimental methods (e.g. reaction time and eyetracking experiments) and statistical modelling. At the moment, she is particularly interested in spoken language. She is also involved in the international multilingual eyetracking corps project MECO (https://meco-read.com/)
Kaidi Lõo
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-405
Ann Siiman
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in Estonian Language (employment contract suspended)
Ann Siiman is a lecturer in Estonian language who teaches morphology, academic Estonian, language editing and professional practice. Her research interests are in morphological variation. She analyzed the variation of the partitive and the illative case in her PhD dissertation. Ann helps coordinate the Centre for Digital Humanities and Information Society and keeps herself up-to-date in her speciality by working as a freelance copy-editor.
Ann Siiman
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in Estonian Language (employment contract suspended)
Maarja-Liisa Pilvik
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Research Fellow in Estonian Language
Jakobi 2-430
Maarja-Liisa Pilvik works as a specialist of corpora and quantitative linguistics and is a PhD student at the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics. Her main areas of research so far have been Finnish verb semantics, morphosyntax of Estonian dialects, and the productivity of derivational morphology in different registers of the Estonian language. More broadly, she is interested in language variation, the entrenchment and cognitive organization of linguistic constructions, and the interplay, competition, and change of the forces guiding actual language use. In her work, she mainly uses corpus data and applies both qualitative and quantitative data analysis methods. She is currently involved in projects which are building the Seto language corpus and the corpus of teen speak, and in a project which is developing the tools for automatic language processing of the 19th century parish court records, as well as testing the potential uses of this important linguistic and historical resource.
Maarja-Liisa Pilvik
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Research Fellow in Estonian Language
Jakobi 2-430
Mari Aigro
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of General Linguistics
Research Fellow in Morphosyntax
Jakobi 2-430
Mari Aigro is a doctoral student and a Junior Research Fellow, specializing in morphosyntax. Her Ph.D thesis focusses on the morphosyntactic variation in verbal argument structure. It is based on quantitative corpus methods and experiments. Mari also works on two projects. The first is an international project called „Feast and famine: Confronting overabundance and defectivity in language“ (co-PI: Virve-Anneli Vihman), in which she investigates the overabundance and defectivity in Estonian inflectional morphology. Together with Mariann Proos, she also works on the project, „The abstractness and concreteness of Estonian words“ is concerned with gathering concreteness ratings for a wide range of Estonian lemmas. Mari is also involved with the organization of the TÜling lecture series and the Experimental Methods Seminar.
Mari Aigro
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of General Linguistics
Research Fellow in Morphosyntax
Jakobi 2-430
Carl Eric Simmul
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Junior Research Fellow in Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics 0.9 p
Carl Eric Simmul is a doctoral student and a junior research fellow in Estonian and Finno-Ugric linguistics. In his PhD project, he investigates the semantic, informational and structural attributes of estonian des-, mata- and maks-converb constructions. He is also a member of a team working on the project “Pragmatics overwrites grammar” that investigates the ways in which subjectivity and intersubjectivity manifest in different registers of Estonian. He is interested in the problems of morphosyntax, semantics, information structure pragmatics, perception, comprehension and learning.
Carl Eric Simmul
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Junior Research Fellow in Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics 0.9 p
Merit Niinemägi
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Junior Research Fellow in Saami Languages 0.3 p
Merit Niinemägi is a doctoral student in Uralic languages and a Junior Research Fellow in Saami languages whose main research interests include morphosyntax as well as language variation and change. In her PhD project, she investigates morphosyntactic variation and change in an endangered and revitalized minority language, Aanaar (Inari) Saami. Merit also participates in the project on Aanaar Saami prosody and morphology.
Merit Niinemägi
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Junior Research Fellow in Saami Languages 0.3 p
Eda-Riin Tuuling
junior research fellow of the Komi language 0,5 p
Eda-Riin Tuuling is a doctoral student of Uralic languages and a junior research fellow of the Komi language. Her PhD thesis focuses on Komi demonstrative pronouns, their pragmatic use and variation. As a junior research fellow she is involved wi in "The Grammar of Discourse Particles in Uralic" project (led by Gerson Klumpp).
Marili Tomingas
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Research Fellow in Livonian
Jakobi 2-418
Marili Tomingas is a doctoral student in Finnic Languages and a Junior Research Fellow in Livonian language. Her PhD project is about the use of Livonian personal pronouns and demonstratives in spoken language. In addition, she is participating at the project „The grammar of discourse particles in Uralic“, where she is investigating Livonian discourse particles. Her research interests are Finno-Ugric languages, syntax, morphology, semantics and spoken language. She has also taught Finnish for beginners at the University of Tartu.
Marili Tomingas
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Research Fellow in Livonian
Jakobi 2-418
Iuliia Zubova
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Junior Research Fellow in Finno-Ugric Studies
Jakobi 2-418
Iuliia Zubova is a junior researcher working with the Udmurt language. She is a team member in the project «Grammar of discourse particles in Uralic languages» led by Gerson Klumpp. She has a background in theoretical linguistics and studies grammatical features of Finno-Ugric languages from the typological perspective. She investigates semantics and syntax of focus and discourse particles and related phenomena in Udmurt. Iuliia has been a part of the project on description of grammar and vocabulary of Beserman Udmurt since 2013. She has participated in about 10 fieldtrips to Northern Udmurtia. In her work, she uses methods of elicitation, corpus analysis, and linguistic experiments.
Iuliia Zubova
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Finno-Ugric Studies
Junior Research Fellow in Finno-Ugric Studies
Jakobi 2-418
Triin Todesk
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Research Fellow in South Estonian Varieties
Jakobi 2-430
Triin Todesk is a research fellow in South Estonian varieties and works with languages like Seto and Mulgi, she has field-work experience with South Estonian speakers both in Estonia and Russia. In Liina Lindström's project "Interdisciplinary corpus of Seto", Triin co-ordinates the transcribing of Seto recordings and takes part in recording new spoken material. Based on these recordings of Seto, she studies the use of discourse particles in Seto for the project „The Grammar of Discourse Particles in Uralic Languages“, led by Gerson Klumpp. With Mulgi, Triin researches its noun declension system and has created the noun declension classes which will be used in the Mulgi dictionary to appear as collaborative work of the University of Tartu, Institute of the Estonian Language, and the Institute of Mulgi Culture. In addition to South Estonian, Triin also works with Komi, for example in her dissertation, she investigated the use of the multi-based Komi clitic džyk with verbs.
Triin Todesk
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Research Fellow in South Estonian Varieties
Jakobi 2-430
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.
Hanna Pook
doctoral student
Hanna Pook is a PhD student of Estonian Linguistics. In her research she has studied Estonian dialect syntax and the use of pronouns in spoken (dialectal) language. Her dissertation focuses on the use of the interrogative-relative pronouns kes and mis and the indefinite pronoun keegi. She has taken a corpus-based approach to her research, using quantitative and statistical methods. In addition to her PhD studies she works as a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute of Estonian Language, where she takes part in compiling the „Estonian Dialect Dictionary“ and „Seto Dictionary“.
Patrick O'Rourke
doctoral student
Patrick O'Rourke is a doctoral student, whose research is on the Livonian substrate in contemporary languages spoken around the Gulf of Riga. This research includes a comparison of phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon, in order to study the historical development of Livonian and its influence on Estonian, South Estonian, Latvian and/or Latgallian dialects that are spoken in previously Livonian-speaking areas. His research interests are Finno-Ugric languages, etymology, historical linguistics, the historical-comparative method and language contacts.
Annika Kängsepp
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Junior Research Fellow in Linguistics
Jakobi 2-430
Annika Kängsepp is a junior research fellow in linguistics, who studies the variation of indefinite pronouns keegi, miski, kumbki and ükski case forms and the factors affecting the variation. In her research, she uses corpus-based and experimental methods. In addition to language variation Annika is interested in Estonian dialects. She works on the project "Interdisciplinary corpus of Seto".
Annika Kängsepp
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Junior Research Fellow in Linguistics
Jakobi 2-430
