Uusküla graduated from
Tallinn Õismäe Humanities High School [
et] in 1998 and from the
University of Tartu's Faculty of Arts and Humanities in 2003, majoring in
Hungarian. Both her master's thesis and doctoral dissertation were supervised by
Urmas Sutrop at the University of Tartu. She defended her dissertation, Basic Colour Terms in Finno-Ugric and Slavonic Languages: Myths and Facts, in 2008 at the Department of General Linguistics.[2]
Career
Uusküla teaches psycholinguistics, anthropological linguistics, semantics, and pragmatics at
Tallinn University. She has taught at several other European universities, in
Roskilde,
Verona,
Milan, and
Budapest.[2][3] She is the head of the Western European Studies program at Tallinn University's Institute of Humanities, where she is an associate professor of linguistics and translation studies.[1][2][7][8] She is the head of the Department of Language History, Dialects, and Finno-Ugric Languages at the
Institute of the Estonian Language.[9][10] Much of her research has focused on linguistic aspects of colors.[11]
Publications
2008: Basic Colour Terms in Finno-Ugric and Slavonic Languages: Myths and Facts
2011: Värvinimede raamat (A Book of Color Names)
2015: "Applying Points-of-View Analysis to Individual Variations in Colour Sorting Data," in Journal of Cognition and Culture 15
2016: Color Language and Color Categorization (coeditor)
2020: "When Does 'Bright' Mean 'Prototypical'? Color-Term Modifiers in Eight European Languages, Examined with Color-Survey Data," in: Journal of the Optical Society of America 37
2023: "Is Purple Lost in Translation? The Affective Meaning of Purple, Violet, and Lilac Cognates in 16 Languages and 30 Populations," in: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 52
2024: "The Purple Mystery: Semantic Meaning of Three Purple Terms in French Speakers from Algeria, France, and Switzerland" (coauthor), in: Color Research & Application 49
Awards and recognitions
2000: Estonian National Culture Foundation Scholar[2]
2020: Professor of the Year, Tallinn University School of Humanities[2]
2021: Achiever of the Year, School of Humanities of Tallinn University[2]
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