People

Ann Veismann is an Associated Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Tartu. Her background lies in cognitive and functional linguistics. Her main research interest is the semantics and usage of grams (adpositions, particles) and more broadly the interconnections between grammar and semantics. She has also been interested in time and space vocabulary in Estonian, conceptual metaphor theory and spatial frames of reference. In addition to qualitative and quantitative corpus studies she is keen on experimental semantics (e.g. forced choice tasks and acceptability ratings).

Piia Taremaa is a Research Fellow in General Linguistics at the University of Tartu. Her research focuses on the relationship between language and cognition. She is particularly interested in how motion and space are expressed in language (including through metaphors) and in the interplay between meaning and morphosyntax. In her work, she applies data-driven methods, combining qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Ene Vainik (b. 1964) is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of the Estonian Language and a cognitive linguist with a focus on the interface between language and psychology. Her research has addressed emotion vocabulary, the expression of feelings in texts, evaluative language use, figurative language, and word associations. She has also studied word classes and constructions from a lexicographic perspective. She received her PhD from the University of Tartu in 2004 with the dissertation Lexical knowledge of emotions: the structure, variability and semantics of the Estonian emotion vocabulary. Her popular science book Eesti tunded. Sõnaportreed (“Estonian Emotions: Word Portraits”, 2016) explores the Estonian vocabulary of emotions.

Vainik was among the first in Estonia to introduce the framework of cognitive grammar (the article series “Genereerib inimene, mitte grammatika” [“It is the Human, Not the Grammar, that Generates”] in Keel ja Kirjandus, 1992; Eesti väliskohakäänded kognitiivse grammatika vaatenurgast [“Estonian External Local Cases from the Perspective of Cognitive Grammar”], 1995). She has also translated into Estonian George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s influential book Metaphors We Live By (1980; Estonian translation 2011). She is a member of the Estonian Cognitive Linguistics Association, the Estonian Association of Applied Linguistics, and the Mother Tongue Society.

Marge Käsper is a French language lecturer at the Institute of World Languages ​​and Cultures of the University of Tartu. In her research, she focuses on contrastive linguistics and linguistic-social discourse analysis, combining the tools of corpus linguistics and lexicometrics with qualitative socio-cognitive discourse analysis. Her research topics have been academic discourse, affects and agency in crisis discourses, media representation of remote work, artificial intelligence, and other topics. Metaphors are an important conceptual framework for Marge to study socio-cultural thought patterns, or pre-discourses, expressed in language.