UEF's data driven research seminar: Linguistic perspectives to politics and culture

Professor Jukka Tyrkkö, from Linnaeus University, Sweden will give a talk on Linguistic perspectives to politics and culture.

Abstract

Language plays a central role in nearly all human endeavours, and consequently the textual and linguistic analysis of the written and spoken record of our common heritage can play a key role in uncovering broader diachronic and synchronic tendencies and trends that may otherwise escape our attention. In this talk, I will focus on the language of politics and the many ways in which the systematic study of political language over time and contrastively across contexts can reveal how both elected and unelected leaders manufacture consent and manipulate public opinions. Over the course of the presentation, I will refer to both recently published studies and present some new findings, as well as discuss the general principles of studying political language use and cultural phenomena with the aid of linguistic corpora. Some of the topics covered will include changes in the use of inclusive and exclusive language use, the ways in which major crises and developments in media affect political speaking, the uses of repetition and other rhetorical tropes, and how the language of civil rights activists differs from elected politicians.

Bio

Jukka Tyrkkö is Professor of English Linguistics at Linnaeus University. He has previously served as Professor of English at the University of Tampere and a Visiting Professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Turku, and later in the spring of 2023 he will be Visiting Professor at Heidelberg University. Jukka has primarily worked in diachronic corpus linguistics, focusing on a variety of fields including medical writing, political discourse, lexicography, and computer-mediated communication. His work is primarily quantitative in nature, with a particular interest in lexical and phraseological patterns. He is currently an executive board member of ICAME, chair of the Helsinki Society for Historical Lexicography, and series editor of Language, Data Science and Digital Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic) with Prof. Mikko Laitinen.

Welcome!

For more information, please contact Professor Mikko Laitinen, email mikko.laitinen@uef.fi.