My doctoral dissertation was a contrastive valence theory study of German and Finnish infinitives. For my material I was able to use postcard sized printed notes of German sentences containing infinitives from the corpus of the IDS ­– Institute of German Language in Mannerheim and piles of computer printouts with examples of Finnish infinitives from the Oulu corpus. The corpus linguistics of today is light years ahead.

Another long-term interest is word formation, which also opens numerous perspectives for the comparison of German and Finnish. When retirement began to approach and I was preparing the last of my lectures on word formation, I stopped off at Pöchlarn during a 2013 cruise of the Danube in order to take a photo of the legendary Donaudampfschiff(f)ahrtsgesellschaft office building for the title page of my teaching material. The company’s name has been the butt of many language jokes which claim that German compound words are the longest in the world. Fictitious constructions include Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänswitwenrenten­überschussausgleich and Donau­dampfschiffahrts­elektrizitäten­hauptbetriebswerk­bauunterbeamten­gesellschaft. But many a true word is said in jest. In administrative language there are such tongue-twisters as Rindfleisch­etikettierungs­überwachungs­aufgaben­übertragungs­gesetz and Grundstücks­verkehrs­genehmigungs­zuständigkeits­übertragungs­verordnung. This should do nothing to frighten us Finns, as the Finnish language is equally capable of such performances.

In the 1980s Professor Jarmo Korhonen persuaded me to participate in a phraseology project which was just beginning. Phraseology is the study of fixed expressions. At first my own focus—and that of the entire project—was on the study of German and Finnish verbal idioms, but in recent years I have focused on so-called pragmatic phraseology, of which two main types can be distinguished: the first being so-called routine expressions, for example greetings and apologies and many other kinds of politeness phrases and the second being so-called conversational clarifiers connected to the processing of speech. Both types are also important in foreign language teaching, which currently stresses communicative competence.

Cooperation has been particularly fruitful with Annikki Liimatainen, formally of the University of Helsinki and now acting professor of German translation at the University of Tampere. A cause for joy has also been the collection Beiträge zur pragmatischen Phraseologie (2011), in which we were co-editors, Anna Ruusila’s dissertation Pragmatische Phraseologismen und ihre lexikografische Darstellung (2014), which was completed under the main guidance of Dr Liimatainen with my assistance and the fact that the theme for the symposium publication in honour of my 65th birthday, edited by Leena Kolehmainen, Hartmut Lenk ja Liisa Tiittula, was Kommunikative Routinen – Formen, Formeln, Forschungsbereiche (2014).

Since childhood the world of poetry has intrigued me, and later it has been interesting to study the translation of lyrics. Recently the focus has been the poems of Johannes Bobrowski. Paavo Rintala has not only translated Bobrowski’s poems but has also utilised them in a collage-like fashion as material for his work Sarmatian Orfeus. Tracking down Bobrowski in Rintila’s text is like the exciting work of a detective, where collaboration—this time with Christoph Parry, professor of German literature at the University of Vaasa—has been both enjoyable and beneficial. The disciplines of lingustics and literature could benefit each other much more than is presently the case.

I cannot bring myself to completely abandon any of the abovementioned research fields in my retirement. My newest research topic, complex German compound structures, is a return to syntax. Ending German subordinate clauses with a verb, which is notoriously difficult for language learners, doesn’t always succeed in the mouths of Germans either. Especially interesting are cases where a so-called intermediate clause is embedded within the subordinate clause. Particularly when subordinate conjunctions are placed one after the other (e.g. dass wenn), even Germans sometimes forget to end the higher subordinate clause (the dass clause) with a verb. In spoken language this is rather common, but the phenomenon is not unknown in newspaper texts. The explanation might be that newspaper articles typically refer to the statements of other individuals and use quasi-quotations where the border is blurred between direct and indirect speech. In addition, it has been demonstrated that such divergent syntax has pragmatic functions that structures ending in a verb lack.