Helsingin yliopisto - Englantilainen filologia

Irma Taavitsainen

Director of the Department
Deputy Director of the Research Unit

Room: C610
Consultation: Wed 13-14 or by appointment, sign-up sheet (autumn term), Mon 13-14 or by appointment, sign-up sheet (spring term)

Telephone national: (09) 191 22495 (Department)
Telephone international: +358 9 191 22495

Telephone national: (09) 191 23516 (Research Unit)
Telephone international: +358 9 191 23516

E-mail: irma.taavitsainen(at)helsinki.fi

Research interests

My research interests cover historical pragmatics and corpus linguistics, historical
discourse analysis, genre and text type studies, diachronic studies on register variation, and the position of English in Finland. The research project Scientific Thought-styles: the Evolution of English Medical Writing is at a dynamic phase. The team are working on a book Medical Writing in Early Modern England (eds. Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). In addition to editing and coauthoring the introduction, my chapters will deal with the dissemination and appropriation of humoral theory and metadiscursive practices in different genres and layers of medical writing. Our previous volume Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English (eds. Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta) came out in 2004 (Cambridge University Press). It was based on the corpus of Middle English Medical Texts 1375-1500 (MEMT, compiled by Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta and Martti Mäkinen, Amsterdam and Philadelphia : Benjamins 2005). The new book will be based on the corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts 1500-1700 (forthcoming in 2009).

My work in historical pragmatics continues with coediting the Journal of Historical Pragmatics and the Handbook of Historical Pragmatics (Mouton de Gruyter, forthcoming). A coedited volume Speech Acts in the History of English (eds. Andreas H. Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, Amsterdam and Philadelphia : Benjamins) came out in 2008. My contributions include a series of coauthored studies on expressive speech acts, like insults, compliments and apologies; we’ll focus on thanks next (forthcoming). Another coedited volume, Methods in Historical Pragmatics (eds. Susan Fitzmaurice and Irma Taavitsainen, Berlin and New York : Mouton de Gruyter) came out in 2007.

My work in VARIENG continues as a domain leader, team leader and deputy director. My other activities include LANGNET postgraduate school. I am a board member, and together with Ulla-Maija Kulonen, we head the programme of Variation, Contacts and Change. Its highlight was a four-day seminar at the Finnish Institute in Athens in October 2008. I am the vice-president of FINSSE and a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. In addition, I am a board member of IAUPE (International Association of University Professors of English).

I gave two plenary talks at international conferences in 2008: at ICAME29 (May) and at MESS (Poznan) in November, and gave talks at ICEHL15 (Munich) and  ISLE1 (Freiburg). In March 2009, I have been invited to Japan to give two plenary lectures at a Historical Pragmatics conference. My other conference activities in 2008 include invited talks on corpus linguistics at a conference on Methods in English and American Culture, Language, and Literature Studies in Bad Bederkesa in Germany at the end of March, and a talk at a
conference on the vernacularisation of knowledge in Barcelona in October.