Miina Norvik

Visiting PhD Student in General Linguistics

Office: C348
Telephone: +46-8-16 31 56
Fax: +46-8-15 53 89
Email: miina@ling.su.se

Research interests

Grammaticalization process, tense and aspect, Finnic languages

Research projects

The PhD project is a study about future time reference in Finnic languages, especially in Livonian. In Finnic languages, the future is often expressed by means of the present tense. On such occasions, the future meaning arises from a broader context or is overtly supported by the adverbs that place a situation to the future. However, in addition to the present tense, there are also periphrastic devices that convey the future, i.e. there are certain verbs that seem to have developed or are developing into future markers (in every Finnic language there seems to be at least one partly developed future-marking device). The aim of this PhD project is to concentrate on such periphrastic devices and to see to what extent these devices have become grammaticalized. The study proceeds from the broader typological background in that in addition to drawing parallels between Finnic languages, it acompares the future constructions of Finnic languages also to the periphrastic future markers of other European languages.

Supervisors

Karl Pajusalu (Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, University of Tartu)
Helle Metslang (Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics, University of Tartu)

Miina Norvik is a visting PhD Student from Tartu during the spring semester 2012.