Matti Juhani Rissanen (23 June 1937 in Viipuri – 24 January 2018 in Vantaa) was a Finnish professor emeritus and researcher in English linguistics.^[1][2] Rissanen worked at the University of Helsinki as a docent of English philology 1969–1970, an assistant professor 1970–1977 and as a professor 1977–2001.^[3] He was also chair of the university's language centre.

1991 saw the publication of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, a seminal English-language corpus of historical texts, of which Rissanen was editor-in-chief.^[4] He has been characterised accordingly as 'a pioneer in English historical corpus linguistics'.^[5]

In 1995, Rissanen founded, and became the first director of, the English linguistics research unit Varieng at the University of Helsinki,^[6] and in 1998 was president of the Societas Linguistica Europaea.^[7]

He received a range of honours and awards. He became an honorary doctor at the University of Uppsala, Sweden (2001); was elected to the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters; and he became an honorary member of the Modern Language Society (2005), the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, and the Japan Association for English Corpus Studies (2006).^[8] In 2012, Rissanen received the Alfred Kordelin Prize, comprising a €30,000 research grant.^[9]

In the recollection of his former student and colleague Matti Kilpiö, Rissanen's 'optimism [...] was infectious, his energy unfailing'.^[10]

Major works

• The uses of one in Old and Early Middle English, PhD thesis. 1967
• Problems in the translation of Shakespeare's imagery into Finnish : with special reference to Macbeth. Mémoires de la Société néophilologique de Helsinki 36. Helsinki 1971
• Corpus-based studies of diachronic English, ed. by Roberta Facchinetti and Matti Rissanen. Lang, Bern - New York 2006