Spoken language and communication
Our research in spoken language and communication focuses primarily on Estonian spoken communication and the mechanisms underlying it. We focus mainly on everyday conversations, as well as more specific contexts of language use and varieties, such as teenagers’ language, emergency call center calls, everyday conversations and institutional language. Spoken language research is a broad field, including morphosyntactic or lexical characteristics specific to spoken language, the conversational goals fulfilled by different types of linguistic units, how attitudes and emotions are expressed linguistically, or what functions are filled by interrogatives which do not ask for information.
Researchers related to the field
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
Andriela Rääbis
Department of Estonian
Laboratory of Spoken and Computer Mediated Communication
Research Fellow in Spoken Language
Jakobi 2-407
Andriela Rääbis is a research fellow in spoken language and the administrator of the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of the University of Tartu. Her main research interests have been the structure of the conversation, questions and answers, directive sequences in institutional and everyday interaction. In her PhD dissertation, defended in 2009, she studied the structure and interactional functions of the openings of Estonian telephone conversations. The main research methods are conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. Her current research focuses on emergency calls. Andriela is also involved in a project which aim is to study particles and verbs that express various degrees of probability, emotions and attitudes in different registers.
Andriela Rääbis
Department of Estonian
Laboratory of Spoken and Computer Mediated Communication
Research Fellow in Spoken Language
Jakobi 2-407
Liina Lindström
tänapäeva eesti keele professor
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.
Renate Pajusalu
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of General Linguistics
Head of Department, Professor of General Linguistics
Jakobi 2-403
Renate Pajusalu is the Professor of General Linguistics from 2007. She has mostly studied semantics and pragmatics. Her studies include word semantics and interactional linguistics, both also from first and second language acquisition perspective. She has also studied linguistic politeness. The main focus of her research has been referential practices in Estonian, Russian and Finnish. She leads the working group “Referential Practices”, which participate in the Excellence Centre “Estonian Studies”. She is interested in contrastive grammar and pragmatics of Estonian and Finnish and is an author of a textbook on Estonian language based on Finnish language. She has been active in organizing Linguistics Olympiad in Estonia from 2003.
Renate Pajusalu
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of General Linguistics
Head of Department, Professor of General Linguistics
Jakobi 2-403
Virve-Anneli Vihman
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Applied Linguistics
Associate Professor of Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-416
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Deputy Head of Development
Jakobi 2-416
+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
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Applied Linguistics
Associate Professor of Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-416
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Deputy Head of Development
Jakobi 2-416
+372 5349 6820
Kirsi Laanesoo-Kalk
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in Estonian Language
Jakobi 2-407
Kirsi Laanesoo is a research fellow in Estonian morphosyntax and pragmatics. Her research area is spoken language and social interaction. She studies naturally occuring interaction with the methodology of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. Her special research interest is interrogatives and their functions in interaction. In her dissertation she analyzed interrogatives in Estonian interaction that are not used for asking information. Currently, she focuses on studying Estonian emergency calls as well as analyzing verbs and particles that express probability, emotions and attitudes in Estonian.
Kirsi Laanesoo-Kalk
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in Estonian Language
Jakobi 2-407
Andra Rumm
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in Estonian Language (employment contract suspended) 0.5 p
Andra Rumm is a research fellow in Estonian morphosyntax and pragmatics, and her research draws on interactional linguistics and conversation analysis. She is interested in what linguistic means people use in interaction to achieve their goals and which social norms they follow. For example, in her thesis, she studied how friends and family members design their questions, what they implement with questions, and how they respond in interaction. With the research group, she analyses the structure of Estonian emergency calls and interactional problems that occur there. She is also involved in a project that studies how language users express probability, emotions, and attitudes in different registers.
Andra Rumm
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in Estonian Language (employment contract suspended) 0.5 p
Joshua Wilbur
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Centre for Digital Humanities and Information Society, University of Tartu
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 and Information Society, University of Tartu
Lecturer in Digital Linguistics
Jakobi 2-417
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
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
Piret Upser
doctoral student
Piret Upser is a PhD student of Estonian language, mainly spoken language and interaction. Her doctoral thesis focuses on Estonian emergency calls and the interactional problems within the calls. She aims to determine the cause of the interactional problems in emergency calls and ways to avoid them. As a member of the Laboratory of Spoken and Computer Mediated Communication, she also studies other aspects of Estonian emergency calls, also general spoken and internet language.
Andra Annuka-Loik
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in Estonian Text Linguistics
Jakobi 2-406
Andra Annuka-Loik is a doctoral student who is focused on spoken interaction. In her thesis she analyses how speakers use laughter and smile voice in both institutional and everyday conversation. Her analysis draws on conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. She is also a part of a research group where they analyze Estonian emergency calls.
Andra Annuka-Loik
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Estonian
Lecturer in Estonian Text Linguistics
Jakobi 2-406
Mari-Liis Korkus
doctoral student
Mari-Liis Korkus is a PhD student at the Department of Applied Linguistics who is mainly interested in topics such as multilingualism and identity. Her current research revolves around the oral language use of Swedish Estonians, with a particular emphasis on the daily communication of teenage speakers. Additionally, she is involved with the „Teen Speak in Estonia“ project.
