His doctoral dissertation, “Challenges in categorization: Corpus-based studies of adjectival premodifiers in English” was accepted with distinction in November 2016, after which he has continued working as Postdoctoral Researcher in three projects funded by the Research Council of Finland: “Reassessing language change: The challenge of real time”, “Democratization, mediatization and language practices: Studying language use in Britain, 1700–1950”, and “Categorization, creativity and change in Construction Grammar”. Vartiainen’s research interests include corpus linguistics, linguistic categorization and category change, Construction Grammar, lexical semantic change, discourse pragmatics, and historical sociolinguistics.
PhD, Docent
Room C621, Unioninkatu 40
PL 24, 00014 Helsingin yliopisto, Finland
E-mail: turo.vartiainen(at)helsinki.fi
My research has focused on three main topics: grammatical variation and change, historical sociolinguistics, and discourse pragmatics (especially in relation to democratization).
In my recent postdoctoral project, “Categorization, creativity and change in Construction Grammar” (2020–2023), I examined questions related to the creative use of constructions from a variety of perspectives, and some of the main findings of this project will be reported in a special issue in English Language and Linguistics in 2025, co-edited with Prof. Tanja Säily. Another forthcoming publication, which illustrates my research on discourse pragmatics, will appear in a special issue in Journal of Historical Pragmatics (2024), which I have co-edited with Dr. Turo Vartiainen and Jenni Räikkönen.
For my work in historical sociolinguistics, see, e.g., two special issues published in the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics: “Constructing the social margins in Early and Late Modern English” (2017; edited by Minna Nevala, Turo Vartiainen and Marianna Hintikka) and “Comparative sociolinguistic perspectives on the rate of linguistic change” (2020; edited by Terttu Nevalainen, Tanja Säily and Turo Vartiainen).