Fred Göran Karlsson (born February 17, 1946, in

Turku Turku ( ; ; , ) is a city in Finland and the regional capital of Southwest Finland. It is located on the southwestern coast of the country at the mouth of the Aura River (Finland), River Aura. The population of Turku is approximately , while t ...

) is a professor emeritus of general

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

at the

University of Helsinki The University of Helsinki (, ; UH) is a public university in Helsinki, Finland. The university was founded in Turku in 1640 as the Royal Academy of Åbo under the Swedish Empire, and moved to Helsinki in 1828 under the sponsorship of Alexander ...

Education and background

Karlsson's father Göran Karlsson was a prominent linguist and worked as a professor of Finnish Language and Literature at

Åbo Akademi Turku ( ; ; , ) is a city in Finland and the regional capital of Southwest Finland. It is located on the southwestern coast of the country at the mouth of the River Aura. The population of Turku is approximately , while the metropolitan area ...

. Fred Karlsson studied

Finnish language Finnish (endonym: or ) is a Finnic languages, Finnic language of the Uralic languages, Uralic language family, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official langu ...

at Åbo Akademi and

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

at the

University of Turku The University of Turku (, shortened ''UTU'') is a multidisciplinary public university with eight faculties located in the city of Turku in southwestern Finland. The university also has campuses in Rauma and Pori and research stations in Kevo ...

, and graduated in 1969. In 1972 he graduated in linguistics at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

. Karlsson earned his Ph.D. in phonetics at the University of Turku in 1974.

Academic career

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

Karlsson has designed a language-independent formalism called Constraint Grammar. It makes possible the automatic morphological disambiguation and syntactic analysis of ordinary running text that has been supplied with all theoretically possible morphological and syntactic interpretations. The basic original reference is Karlsson (1990) which defines Constraint Grammar. Karlsson has also worked on the history of linguistics, where his main contribution is participation in a book by Even Hovdhaugen, Fred Karlsson, Carol Henriksen, and Bengt Sigurd, ''The History of Linguistics in the Nordic Countries'', Societas Scientiarum Fennica, Jyväskylä 2000. Although Karlsson is a

Swedish-speaking Finn The Swedish-speaking population of Finland (whose members are called by many names—see below; ; ) is a linguistic minority in Finland. They maintain a strong identity and are seen either as a separate cultural, ethnic or linguistic group or, ...

, his knowledge of his second native language Finnish is exceptionally good, and he is widely considered a de facto authority on the language's rules. His work on the language (e.g. ''Finnish: An Essential Grammar'', Karlsson (2004), originally published in 1983 and republished in 1999) has been used in various Finnish translations of

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

projects.

Sources

External links

Official home page

Karlsson (1990)Hovdhaugen, Karlsson, Henriksen & Sigurd 2000
1946 births Living people Finnish scientists Swedish-speaking Finns Linguists from Finland Academic staff of the University of Helsinki People from Turku {{finland-linguist-stub