[1][2] Originally from Moscow, Koptjevskaja-Tamm's interest in linguistics was stimulated when as a teenager she participated in the Moscow Linguistics Olympiad, winning a medal.
[1][3] After working as a researcher on a project on part-of-speech systems in the world's languages, she was appointed docent in linguistics at Stockholm University in 1993, and was promoted to full professor in 2001.
[4] Koptjevskaja-Tamm carries out research in the field of linguistic typology, focusing on syntax and semantics.
Her 2002 monograph on the structure and use of nominalizations across the world's languages is widely cited.
[1][6] In 2015 she published a volume on how languages encode and conceptualize temperature.