Karita Suomalainen

My main research interests lie in the area of interactional linguistics. My doctoral dissertation (2020, University of Turku) examined the use of second person singular forms in Finnish everyday conversations. In addition, I have also studied the use of referential expressions more generally, especially the open use of person expressions, the particle-like use of Finnish second-person imperatives, and different referring expressions that occur in hate speech. I have also examined the question of units in language and interaction from the point of view of fixed expressions.

I work as a university lecturer in Finnish language at Åbo Akademi University (Turku, Finland). I enjoy teaching and collaboration with colleagues. Currently, I participate in projects that deal with the linguistic practices of psychotherapeutic interaction, neverending sentences and utterance completion and continuation in Finnish and Japanese, and grammar writing from the point of view of social actions. Previously, I have worked in the project “Arkisyn: Morphosyntactically coded database of conversational Finnish” (2016–2020, funded by Kone Foundation). In 2021–2023 I was a visiting scholar at the Department of Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, University of Aarhus.

In addition to teaching and doing research, I work as the literature reviews editor for Finland’s oldest linguistic quarterly, Virittäjä.