Research Unit for Variation and Change in English (VARIENG)

Department of English
University of Helsinki

Director: Professor Terttu Nevalainen
tel. +358 9 191 24742
fax +358 9 191 23072
terttu.nevalainen(at)helsinki.fi

The Unit is divided into five teams concentrating on the following areas of research: (1) internal processes of linguistic change, (2) historical sociolinguistics, (3) dialectology and regional variation, (4) text conventions and genre evolution, and (5) pragmatic variability.

The work of the Unit advances on both methodological and theoretical fronts. While its individual research teams aim at producing new syntheses in their given fields, the overall objective of the Unit is to promote a comprehensive approach to language variation and change based on these syntheses.

Between the years 2000 and 2005, the Unit will concentrate on the following three goals:

1. To maintain and further develop its position as an international research and information centre for English corpus studies, with particular focus on historical and regional corpora.

2. To produce syntheses of the special methodological and theoretical issues in the five areas of research mentioned above. These syntheses will contribute to the understanding of the influence of various language-internal and language-external factors affecting the development and present-day variation of the English language.

3. To model language variation and change at a level of generality that that can also benefit the study of languages other than English.

The most widely-known material and methodological tool produced by the Unit so far is the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, a large structured database of English texts with a time span of a millennium, which is now being used in hundreds of universities and research centres all over the world.

In the 1990s, other comprehensive electronic corpora were produced by the research projects on "Sociolinguistics and language history", "Older Scots" and "Scientific thought styles". They include the Corpus of Older Scots, which is the only historical corpus of Scottish English in the world now completed, and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, which is the most extensive historical letter corpus in English. A number of other English-language corpora are also in preparation.

The personnel of the Unit consists of eighteen scholars, fifteen collaborating scholars from other universities, sixteen postgraduate students and fifteen undergraduate research assistants.

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