My main research interest within English linguistics has been semantics. During my career so far, I have contributed to the development of a branch of linguistics, historical cognitive semantics. The main culmination of this work so far was the publication of the volume Historical Cognitive Linguistics by De Gruyter Mouton in 2010. I edited it together with Margaret E. Winters and Kathryn Allan.

It all started when I wrote my MA and PhD theses on words and metaphors for the concept of LOVE in the English language. The PhD thesis was published in 2003. I was among the first people to use electronic corpora as data for research on conceptual metaphors for emotions in English and to develop a method for doing that.

My research mainly concerns how emotions have been conceptualized in Early Modern (ca 1500–1700), Late Modern (ca 1700–1900) and Present-Day English (ca 1900–). I have published research on the following emotions: anxiety, calmness, excitement, fear, happiness, hate, hope, love, pride, respect, sadness, and shame. I have also applied a similar corpus method to the study of words for politeness in 18th century English. In addition, I have studied the development of words for politeness in the Historical Thesaurus of English.

In 2011, Ulla Vanhatalo decided to translate the Natural Semantic Metalanguage into Finnish. She sent an invitation to a Finnish e-mail list for linguists in 2011, asking all colleagues if they would like to collaborate. Eventually, two people decided to collaborate, Anna Idström and I. That was the beginning of two already published articles on the Finnish version of NSM. These articles are mainly based on Vanhatalo’s ideas, but I have learned much from her.

Ulla Vanhatalo, Mari Siiroinen and I have written an article manuscript on Finnish viha ‘anger, hate’ and received money for a new project on how well Finnish people recognize words for emotions defined in terms of NSM. I also plan to use the NSM method to study English words for virtue in the 18th century. In other words, I plan to test how it can be used to study historical corpus data. I have already given a paper on this topic at the Sixth International Conference on Late Modern English (LMEC 6) in Uppsala in August 2017.