I set up a contrastive German-Finnish phraseology project in 1985 at the University of Oulu, which was funded by, among others, the Academy of Finland in the years 1986-91. The initial focus of the research was on idioms, later expanding to include proverbs and other set phrases. Central research topics have been the structure, employment and historical development of phraseological units (‘phrasemes’), the translation of phrasemes from German to Finnish and vice versa as well as how they are recorded in dictionaries.

Many large corpora consisting of written and spoken language text samples were compiled for the project, which generated a great number of theses, articles, monographs and compilations. My German-Finnish idiom dictionary Alles im Griff. Homma hanskassa published in 2001 was a spin-off from the project. I am currently working on an introductory work on phraseology, aimed at a wider audience, with plans for completion in 2016.

In the mid-1990s, I launched plans for a new German-Finnish general dictionary. To support the work, we started the German-Finnish lexicography project. The Academy of Finland and the German Academic Exchange Service, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, jointly funded the project. Work on the dictionary itself received financial support from many Finnish foundations and the Ministry of Education. The compiling of word entries began in 1997 and the general dictionary was published in 2008 with the name Saksa–suomi-suursanakirja. Großwörterbuch Deutsch-Finnisch (ed. Jarmo Korhonen).

In 2012 Professor Albrecht Greule from the University of Regensburg and I initiated an international project called ‘Historisches syntaktisches Verbwörterbuch des Deutschen’. It is a subproject of the CoCoLaC research unit at the University of Helsinki with research contributions from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Finland. The project aims to describe the syntactic development of a selection of German verbs starting from the eighth century all the way to modern German. These descriptions will be used first for individual historical verb entries, which will later be published in the form of a new kind of specialist dictionary for German scholars.