English, Early Modern

Helena Raumolin-Brunberg is a senior researcher in the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English (VARIENG) at the University of Helsinki. Apart from a three-year period as acting Associate Professor at the Department of Translation Studies (1989–1992), she has been a researcher at the Department of English in Helsinki. Raumolin-Brunberg's research interests include historical sociolinguistics, language change, corpus linguistics, nominal syntax, and Early Modern English, on which she has published c. 50 articles. Her doctoral dissertation was The noun phrase in early sixteenth-century English: a study based on Sir Thomas More's writings (1991). Her other books, co-edited and co-authored with Terttu Nevalainen, include Sociolinguistics and language history: studies based on the corpus of Early English correspondence (1996) and Historical sociolinguistics: language change in Tudor and Stuart England (2003). She was one of the compilers of both the Early Modern English section of the Helsinki corpus of English Texts and the Corpus of early English correspondence. Her current research focuses on the behavior of individuals under ongoing linguistic change. In this area, she has made longitudinal analyses of individual usage, studied the impact of migration on the linguistic choices individuals make, and traced leaders of linguistic change.