Kari received his FK (MA) in 1994 and continued his studies at the Graduate School Kielellinen merkitys ja sen prosessointi. His doctoral dissertation in 2003 focused on The Spatio-Temporal Setting in Written Narrative Fiction.
In addition to General Linguistics, Kari has studied English Philology, East Asian Languages and Cultures (mainly Japanese), General Phonetics and University Pedagogics.
Kari is interested in a variety of things, including referentiality, spatiotemporality, texts, euphemisms, textual worlds, the relations between text and discourse, and textual meaning. In addition to text and discourse related matters, he has worked with corpora and both Swedish and Finnish morphological analyzers, disambiguation etc. at the Research Units for Computational Linguists and Multilingual Language Technology.
He has taught a variety courses at the Department of General Linguistics, including e.g. An Introduction to General Linguistics, The Basics of Unix for Linguists, Advanced Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics, Language and Context, Language and Culture, Sociolinguistics, Text and Discourse Linguistics, etc.