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The Finnish novelist Kaarlo (Kalle) Alvar Päätalo's (1919–2000) main work, the Iijoki series, consists of 26 novels (comprising ca. 17 000 pages) and was written in 1971–1998. In this book the text corpus in Kielipankki concerning Päätalo's works is introduced to the readers, as well as the possibilities of digital text mining.
This book includes scientific articles concerning the works of Kalle Päätalo. It also gives ideas for the research that can be carried out in the future. The authors of this book are researchers in the fields of history, linguistics and literature, respectively. The research results presented in this book speak for the fact that the Iijoki series is a significant source material for future research, for example from the point of view of oral history, language variation, metalanguage, swearing and the reader's reception. The possibilities for future research seem to be quite plentiful.

El 15 de setembre del 2005 la ICANN va aprovar el primer domini d'Internet de primer nivell destinat a una llengua i cultura humanes en particular: .cat. Aquest article explica la història de la campanya catalana per aconseguir el domini .cat en contra de l'oposició política de l'antic govern conservador espanyol i la resistència d'alguns dels encarregats de prendre les decisions en els cercles de la ICANN. Mentre que el .cat crea un precedent per a un major ús de les llengües minoritàries a Internet, hi ha importants obstacles per a altres candidats a dominis de primer nivell basats en la llengua. L'article parla dels factors concomitants que calen per a donar suport a un major ús de qualsevol llengua minoritària a Internet. ; On 15 September 2005 ICANN approved the first top-level Internet domain to be devoted to a particular human language and culture: .cat. This paper describes the history of the Catalan campaign to win the .cat domain against political opposition from the former conservative Spanish government and the reluctance of some decision-makers within ICANN circles. While .cat creates a precedent for greater use on the Internet of 'minority languages', there are significant hurdles for other candidates for language-based top-level domains. The paper discusses the concomitant factors needed to support the greater use of any minority language on the Internet. ; El 15 de septiembre de 2005 ICANN aprobó el primer dominio de primer nivel destinado a una lengua y cultura en particular: .cat. Este artículo presenta el desarrollo de la campaña catalana para conseguir el dominio .cat en contra de la oposición del anterior gobierno conservador español y la resistencia de algunos de los responsables de tomar las decisiones dentro de los círculos de ICANN. Mientras que .cat crea un precedente para un mayor uso de "lenguas minoritarias" en Internet, hay importantes obstáculos para otros candidatos a dominios de primer nivel en función de la lengua. El artículo hace referencia a los factores concomitantes requeridos para apoyar un mayor uso de cualquier lengua minoritaria en Internet.

The book focuses on intangible and tangible heritage, language and vernacular religion of the Ingrians, Setos and Votes, three Finnic ethnic minorities sharing a long-standing identification with the Russian Orthodox faith. Written by 16 authors, the chapters are mainly based on nineteenth- and twentieth-century materials. The research history and collecting of folklore are also discussed.The historical area of the Ingrians and Votes is located in Ingria, adjacent to St. Petersburg, while the Setos have inhabited both sides of the border of southern Estonia and Russia. All three groups live on the borderline of the Eastern and Western Churches and cultural realms.Currently, the Ingrian and Votic languages are extremely endangered, while the Seto language has approximately 12,000 speakers. There is a high local interest in the maintenance and revitalisation of all three languages and cultural traditions.

The present volume is a multidisciplinary collection of research articles exploring language use, language contact and multilingualism in the history of Turku, the first town in Finland, founded around the turn of the fourteenth century. Consisting of an introduction by the editors and nine case studies in the fields of linguistics, history, archeology, and literary and cultural studies, the volume participates in a wider discussion on multilingual communities while offering a closer look into linguistic encounters in Turku and its immediate vicinity. The volume covers the period from the Middle Ages (c. 1100–1500) to the latter half of the twentieth century. The case studies illustrate the wide array of languages, linguistic varieties and registers that the inhabitants and travellers used in their daily lives, the specific contexts in which certain languages were used, and the effects of these linguistic encounters at personal, social or institutional levels.

This collection of articles sheds light on the role of human language in interspecies interaction. The book shows that language is not necessarily what separates us from other creatures. It can also be seen as yet another dimension of human existence that is deeply rooted in our shared history and everyday life with other living beings. This volume contains six individual research articles, two short reviews, an opening introduction to the themes of the book, and an extensive, theoretical closing chapter. The studies draw on methodologies and theoretical approaches including conversation analysis and a cognitive, usage-based approach to grammatical constructions. The book further explores the interfaces of linguistics, biosemiotics, and posthumanism. The studies show how linguistic and interactional approaches can contribute to our understanding of how human and non-human animals communicate with each other during embodied activities, how human language users make sense of interspecies encounters in speaking to or about animals, and how human language is thereby impregnated by the presence of other species. The individual research articles study, e.g., interaction with co-present animals, dialectal cow calls, parliamentary speeches, narratives of nature observation, and historical laws.

The topic of the book is the incremental growth of linguistic knowledge from lexical to structural-cum-textual during the so-called later language development. Language mastery does not presuppose any acquaintance with prescriptive grammar but, instead, concerns the core of language which the so-called consensus principle applies to: the most frequent words and structures are mastered with certainty by everybody, but uncertainty increases as less frequent and more variable phenomena are taken into consideration. It is the goal of the study to make explicit the knowledge that is common to school children of different age groups, and to show how it develops both in its core and in its fringe areas. The mastery of less common aspects exhibits considerable statistical variation. The research embodies methodological pluralism insofar as it has been carried out by means both of the corpus method and the experimental method. Here experimental subsumes writing tasks, paper-and-pencil tests, and behavior under experimental conditions. The amount of participants native in Finnish varies from 300–2000. The book has a bipartite structure: mastery of meanings (Part I), and mastery of forms (Part II).

El fenomen de la globalització que vivim actualment ha provocat canvis lingüístics molt importants a escala mundial. L'anglès ha esdevingut la llengua internacional, del poder econòmic i polític, i s'està convertint en la llengua de les classes socials altes i el jovent. Paral·lelament, però, les llengües regionals també estan experimentant una gran difusió, gràcies a les noves interaccions socials i al suport econòmic dels governs que les representen. Alhora, i com a resultat d'aquestes dues tendències, sorgeix el sentiment d'arrelament de les comunitats locals, que veuen la llengua local com a marca d'autenticitat que cal defensar davant del fenomen de la globalització i la regionalització. Ens dirigim, doncs, cap a una societat multilingüe, en què cada llengua ha de tenir les seves pròpies funcions socials distintives, encara que sigui inevitable que es generin conflictes entre les llengües en contacte. En vista d'aquesta situació, l'autor anticipa una pèrdua de l'hegemonia de l'anglès a favor de l'augment de les llengües regionals i una futura extinció de les llengües més minoritàries. ; The globalisation phenomenon that we are currently seeing has lead to major linguistic changes on a worldwide scale. English has become the leading international language, in economic and political spheres, and is becoming the language of high society and of the young. At the same time, however, regional languages are also making considerable headway, thanks to new social interaction and economic backing from their governments. In turn, and as a result of these two trends, there is impetus for feelings of belonging to local communities which see their language as a sign of their own authenticity, one that has to be defended against the phenomena of globalisation and regionalisation. We are thus heading towards a multilingual society, in which each language has its own, distinct social functions, even though it is inevitable that there will be conflict between the languages that come into contact. In this scenario, the author predicts a loss of hegemony for English, in favour of regional languages, and the future extinction of the least spoken minority languages. ; El fenómeno de la globalización que vivimos actualmente ha provocado cambios lingüísticos muy importantes a escala mundial. El inglés se ha convertido en la lengua internacional, del poder económico y político, y se está convirtiendo en la lengua de las clases sociales altas y la juventud. Paralelamente, sin embargo, las lenguas regionales también están experimentado una gran difusión, gracias a las nuevas interacciones sociales y al apoyo económico de los gobiernos que las representan. A su vez, y como resultado de estas dos tendencias, surge el sentimiento de arraigo de las comunidades locales, que ven la lengua local como signo de autenticidad que hay que defender frente al fenómeno de la globalización y de la regionalización. Nos dirigimos, pues, hacia una sociedad multilingüe, en que cada lengua debe tener sus propias funciones sociales distintivas, aunque sea inevitable que se generen conflictos entre las lenguas en contacto. Ante esta situación, el autor anticipa una pérdida de la hegemonía del inglés a favor del aumento de les lenguas regionales y una futura extinción de las lenguas más minoritarias.

This research analyses the patterns of social interaction of a specific group of young people who play on-line games in a cybercafe in Barcelona. This group can be classified as a hybrid -on-line/ off-line- since their face-to-face interaction alternates with, and is frequently superimposed on, their virtual interaction. This means that the delocalization that accompanies other uses of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) occurs only in a limited way. What does take place is a reinterpretation of the forms of social interaction of whatever group of young people; at the same time, there is also an interpretation of new information technologies, adapting them to traditional forms of socialization. It is possible to observe how physical place and cyberplace are united and intermingled in various ways, as are face-to-face life and cyber-experience.

La UE es troba a les portes d'una ampliació que comportarà la incorporació de deu noves llengües oficials, moltes de les quals amb unes dimensions demogràfiques i una vitalitat cultural inferiors a la llengua catalana. L'article comenta que la situació actual del català a la UE és injustificable i escandalosa i que ho resultarà encara més després de l'ampliació. La previsible modificació del règim lingüístic de la UE tendirà a la reducció de les llengües de treball per raons d'eficiència, però l'ampliació de les llengües oficials hauria de permetre incloure-hi llengües com la catalana, que ja són oficials en el seu territori. Tampoc hi ha cap raó perquè el català resulti exclòs dels programes lingüístics europeus, en els quals participen fins i tot llengües de països externs a la UE. Les comunitats lingüístiques amb poders legislatius han de poder regular l'ús públic de les llengües en el seu espai igual que els estats; altrament la mateixa UE indica que sols la independència política garanteix un tracte igualitari. ; The EU is about to enter into an expansion that will mean the incorporation of 10 new official languages, many of which have a lesser demographic dimension and cultural vitality than Catalan. This article comments that the current situation of Catalan in the EU is unjustifiable, scandalous even, and will be even more so following amplification. The foreseeable modification of the EU's linguistic regime will tend towards the reduction of the working languages for reasons of efficiency, but the amplification of its official languages should permit the inclusion of languages like Catalan, which are official in their own territories. Nor is there any reason why Catalan should be excluded from European linguistic programs which are participated in even by the languages of countries outside the EU. Linguistic communities with legislative powers should be able to regulate the public use of languages in their territory just as states do; furthermore, the EU itself indicates that only political independence guarantees equal treatment. ; La UE es troba a les portes d'una ampliació que comportarà la incorporació de deu noves llengües oficials, moltes de les quals amb unes dimensions demogràfiques i una vitalitat cultural inferiors a la llengua catalana. L'article comenta que la situació actual del català a la UE és injustificable i escandalosa i que ho resultarà encara més després de l'ampliació. La previsible modificació del règim lingüístic de la UE tendirà a la reducció de les llengües de treball per raons d'eficiència, però l'ampliació de les llengües oficials hauria de permetre incloure-hi llengües com la catalana, que ja són oficials en el seu territori. Tampoc hi ha cap raó perquè el català resulti exclòs dels programes lingüístics europeus, en els quals participen fins i tot llengües de països externs a la UE. Les comunitats lingüístiques amb poders legislatius han de poder regular l'ús públic de les llengües en el seu espai igual que els estats; altrament la mateixa UE indica que sols la independència política garanteix un tracte igualitari.

This book is the first Finnish-language collection of research on superdiversity. At the core of the book is the growing migration to Finland since the turn of the 1990s and its numerous effects on Finnish society. The interdisciplinary examination of superdiversity is important at the current moment: Finland as a society has reached the point where certain social categories, such as ethnic background, country of birth, mother tongue or gender, are not necessarily sufficient to understand the increased diversity and its consequences.
The book consists of a comprehensive introduction to the topic and thirteen chapters. In Finland, research on superdiversity is carried out especially in critical sociolinguistics and applied language studies, education, cultural studies, social sciences, and urban studies. Therefore, these disciplines are strongly represented in the collection, and the chapters approach a variety of topics including refugees' mental health, experiences of multilingual families, the diversity of education and working life, discursive practices in social media, issues of urban planning and pro-asylum activism.

This thesis is focused on temporal information processing, which is a task framed in the field of natural language processing. The aim of this task is to obtain the temporal location and ordering of the events expressed in text or discourse, which requires the automatic interpretation of temporal expressions, events, and the temporal relations between them. The majority of current approaches are based on morphosyntactic knowledge. However, temporal entities are often ambiguous at that language analysis level. Our hypothesis is that the linguistic expression of time is a semantic phenomenon and therefore, to achieve a better extraction performance, temporal information must be processed using semantics. To prove this hypothesis, we present a semantic approach to temporal information processing: TIPSem. This is an automated system that includes features based on lexical semantics, semantic roles, and temporal semantics, in addition to morphosyntactic features. TIPSem has been empirically evaluated through the participation in the TempEval-2 international evaluation exercise and subsequent experiments based on this test. The results obtained firmly support the presented hypothesis and their analysis demonstrates that semantic features aid in handling morphosyntactic ambiguity and favour generalization capabilities. These conclusions have been reached for different languages (i.e., English, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese), which supports the defended hypothesis at a multilingual level. Finally, as compared with the state of the art, TIPSem obtains a very competitive performance level and introduces a remarkable improvement in event processing. TIPSem has been applied to the problem of graphical representation of temporal information. We have developed a dynamic interface which brings users time-based access to information: Time-Surfer. The results obtained through a user-oriented evaluation of this interface demonstrate that TIPSem's performance is also satisfactory from an extrinsic standpoint. ; This PhD thesis has been supported by the Spanish Government, in projects: TIN-2006-15265-C06-01, TIN-2009-13391-C04-01 and PROMETEO/2009/119, where Hector Llorens is funded under a FPI grant (BES-2007-16256).

Investigadors de l'Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA) de la UAB han publicat a la revista Ecological Economics un dossier especial -Social Metabolism, Ecological Distribution Conflicts, and Valuation Languages- que analitza les relacions entre l'economia ecològica i l'ecologia política, fruit de recerques realitzades a indrets on l'extracció de recursos naturals i la contaminació produeixen conflictes econòmics, ecològics, culturals i socials importants. ; Investigadors de l'Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA) de la UAB han publicat a la revista Ecological Economics un dossier especial - Social Metabolism, Ecological Distribution Conflicts, and Valuation Languages- que analitza les relacions entre l'economia ecològica i l'ecologia política, fruit de recerques realitzades a indrets on l'extracció de recursos naturals i la contaminació produeixen conflictes econòmics, ecològics, culturals i socials importants. ; Researchers from the UAB Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) and other universities have published a special section in the journal Ecological Economics analysing the link between ecological economics and political ecology. This issue stems from the institute's research on impacts and resistance at "commodity frontiers", where extraction of natural resources and disposal of toxic wastes produce a range of economic, environmental, cultural and social conflicts.