Johanna Isosävi

University of Helsinki | HY · Department of Languages

This paper analyses unauthorised turns – namely, interruptions – in parliamentary debates, by focusing on their lesser-studied interactional characteristics, that is, reactions. Drawing upon cross-cultural pragmatics, we compare reactions in Finnish ( Eduskunta of Finland), French ( Assemblée nationale of France) and German ( Bundestag of Germany)...

Politeness is a key means by which we maintain interpersonal relationships. This book is the first comprehensive study of politeness in Finnish. Based on linguistic and pragmatic research, the book spans three parts. The first part is theoretical and historical, summarising three waves of politeness research, describing politeness as a cultural and...

Drawing on cross-cultural pragmatics, this paper examines an intercultural interaction in French between a Finn and two French people, during which meta-pragmatic comments related to finger pointing by the Finn occurred. This language-anchored, bottom-up study combined multiple methods: the interaction was transcribed using multimodal conversation...

Language plays a key role in enabling and restricting participation in society. Considering the increasing linguistic diversity in education, working life and society at large, it is important to understand what it requires from individuals to participate and for institutions to support participation. The yearbook articles explore the concept of pa...

This paper studies 200 signs displayed in commercial premises during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Finland and in France. The data were collected through crowdsourcing via social media platforms and analysed from the perspective of cross-cultural pragmatics. The vast majority of Finnish and French directives were direct, but cross-cult...

Although French courtly models spread to Europe, little research has compared the development of politeness in France with more remote European linguacultures. To fill this gap, I examine folk understandings of historical politeness in Finnish and French linguacultures. Concentrating on cultural outsiders’ own understandings – that is, French peopl...

This study examines addressing choices by combining university students’ and teachers’ perspectives, concentrating on the French pronominal address forms (tu, T and vous, V). Our data consist of a triangulation of an oral discourse completion task (ODCT), retrospective interviews, and focus group discussions among informants consisting of L2 speake...

This paper compares the opening sequences of Finnish, French and Hungarian YouTube videos. We concentrate on addressing, greeting and related gestures, important elements when YouTubers interact with their imagined viewers, using data consisting of 138 videos in the three languages. This study falls within the field of the pragmatics of social medi...

Intercultural interaction may be complicated by differing verbal and nonverbal displays of (im)politeness. Yet cultural outsiders’ evaluations of (im)politeness have not been widely examined. To fill this gap, this study investigated perceptions of Finnish politeness among French people living in Finland and perceptions of French politeness among F...

Given the contested notion of culture, intercultural (im)politeness represents an understudied area of research. Yet, (im)politeness research should examine broader social forces. Drawing upon data from five focus group discussions and their dialogical discourse analysis, my study relies on the discursive approach and relational work (Locher and Wa...

Addressing in various contexts is one of the essential sociolinguistic skills that a language learner needs to acquire. Due to different practices in first (L1) and target (L2) languages, choosing a suitable address form may be challenging for non-native speakers. Yet, only few studies have analyzed the acquisition of address forms, and teachers' p...

Panel: Address Forms across Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Address Terms in Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic Languages (Organized by Yasmin Bayyurt, Ciler Hatipoglu) In the study of address forms, the term “politeness” can hardly be avoided. Laymen often compare different languages: which language is the most polite? It is often said th...

This paper presents a study on translator students’ perceptions on post-editing. Students from two different Master’s level courses were asked to post-edit machine translated texts and reflect on the differences between light and full post-editing, on the differences between translating and post-editing, on the role of error analysis and the use of...

Selvityksessä tutkittiin vuosina 2004–2009 Helsingin yliopiston entiseltä romaanisten kielten laitokselta (nykyään osa nykykielten laitosta) valmistuneiden ranskalaisen, espanjalaisen ja italialaisen filologian maistereiden sijoittumista työelämään. Tarkoituksena oli selvittää miten ja mihin ammatteihin he ovat työllistyneet ja miten he ovat voi...

In English-speaking countries, it is ”Sir” or ”Mam”, in French, ”Monsieur” or ”Madame”. But oh, this clumsy Finnish language! We lack of established terms for calling a waiter. (NYT 40/2007, cited in Isosävi 2010: 185). As the above quote shows, even Finns themselves are sometimes critical of Finnish politeness, and Finnish students of French con...

In English-speaking countries, it is ”Sir” or ”Mam”, in French, ”Monsieur” or ”Madame”. But oh, this clumsy Finnish language! We lack of established terms for calling a waiter. What would be the right form to address them? (NYT-liite 40/2007, cited in Isosävi 2010: 185). As the above quote shows, even Finns themselves are sometimes critical of Fi...

We describe how online conflicts can be analysed with linguistic tools. The case under scrutiny is the ‘massive polylogue’ on YouTube (i.e. the multilingual and global comment thread following the video ‘What languages sound like to foreigners’ by Smokahontas). The comment thread displays themes and conflicts that re-emerge with surprising frequenc...

The authors focus on a particular instance of the global meeting the local: American multinational corporations that seek to transfer informal American styles of interaction to their branches in other countries. They explore how the address practices of the American coffee chain Starbucks have been exported and received in its cafés in Finland and...

http://skskirjat.pikakirjakauppa.fi/images/kurkkaa/D7/9789522226136/978-952-222-613-6_3summ.pdf

Cette étude se concentre sur les manifestations de la polémique et de la violence verbale dans le profil « Contre Nicolas Sarkozy » de Facebook. L’intérêt porte sur la construction des identités discursives et sur les manières avec lesquelles les internautes résolvent les situations violentes. Au total, 1 262 commentaires ont été examinés. Le t...

http://blogs.helsinki.fi/dialog3/files/2015/07/Preface.pdf Full text: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/dialog3/publication/

Comme on le constate sur la quatrième de couverture de cette œuvre, « Le Cadre Européen Commun de Référence pour les langues (CECR) et le dispositif de Bolo- gne ont révolutionné l’apprentissage, l’enseignement et l’évaluation des langues dans les centres universitaires en Europe et un peu partout dans le monde ». C’est dans ce cadre que se situ...

La traduction des formes d’adresse françaises en finnois a, jusqu’à présent, été peu étudiée, bien que les différences dans l’usage des systèmes d’adresse de ces deux langues puissent en rendre la traduction problématique. Dans cet article, l’analyse se limite à la traduction des termes affectifs à valeur positive et négative. Le corpus étudié comp...

The use of forms of address in French films and their Finnish translations The use of forms of address constitutes an integral part of speakers’ communicative competence. In fact, they are not only used to assign to whom the speech is addressed, but also to construct the relationship between speakers. However, the choice of a suitable form is not n...

Notre objectif est d’étudier la traduction finnoise et française des termes d’adresse anglais (pronoms et appellatifs) dans trois romans et trois films américains (v. bibliographie). L’examen de la traduction française-finnoise et finnoise-française de ces termes (Havu 2002, à paraître a et b) nous a permis de constater que les traducteurs s’adapta...

Le choix d’un terme d’adresse peut occasionnellement être problématique pour les locuteurs natifs et non natifs, et de nombreux chercheurs mettent en question toute notion de règle quant aux systèmes d’adresse. Le but de cet article est de comparer essentiellement l’emploi des pronoms d’adresse en italien et en français : les points communs, les...

L'article commence par la brève présentation d’une enquête sur questionnaires effectuée dans le cadre d’un projet lancé par le départe-ment des langues romanes d’Helsinki en 2003 et visant à étudier l’adresse dans les différentes langues romanes parlées en Europe. Les réponses données dans cinq villes françaises (Limoges, Lyon, Metz, Paris, Toulous...