Text research

Ilona Tragel has been working at the University of Tartu since 2001, currently as an Associate Professor of General Linguistics. She has also held the positions of a researcher, head of UT language center and the head of doctoral school. In 2014–2018 she was a lecturer of Estonian at Beijing Foreign Studies University. She defended her doctoral thesis on Estonian core verbs in 2003 at UT. Her theoretical background lies in cognitive linguistics. Her research interests are verbal semantics and polysemy, recently also academic texts and language of Covid-19. Read more: www.ilonatragel.ut.ee.

Riina Reinsalu is a lecturer of Estonian text linguistics who is focused on different genres in the framework of text analysis. She is particularly interested in the legal and administrative language, including applying the principles of plain language in the communication between citizens and local authorities. Riina coordinates the activities of Centre for Estonian Orthography and Composition and supports students in writing academic texts. As a professional copy editor, she also gives various language editing courses.

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.

Elisabeth Kaukonen is a doctoral student, whose field of interest and topic of research is gender-marked vocabulary in Estonian language, its usage and the stands of language users towards gendered vocabulary and feminisation of the language.