As a scholar I feel I am more focused on the use of language than language itself. I specialise in textual research and written official texts, which I have studied inter alia from the perspective of dialogue. I have never understood the study of interactive communication as purely referring to oral communication. Dialogue is not far from intertextuality, which is a recurrent theme in my research, and intertextuality is related to the study of paraphrasing and rhetoric and the examination of power relations: what is taken from one text to be used in another and what it is used for. My research began in the field of so-called critical discourse analysis, which is based on a constructivist view of language. In 2006, I launched a research project called Tekstualisoiva julkishallinto (‘Textualising public administration’), which has mostly progressed with the help of students. As a result of the project, linguistic constructivism has begun to be set in an ever stronger framework of genre research. The students involved in the project – with Kati Karvinen and Jenni Viinikka on the frontline – have studied customer and patient reports as a genre, abandoning the tight interpretations of the critical research tradition.

The project has created new views on both linguistic devices and the diversity of written language – maybe even the beginning of a new paradigm. Unlike spoken language, written language has often been considered homogeneous. Any variations in written language have been seen as imperfections or purely as manifestations of power, rather than qualities of language or genre.

Genre research and the study of official language alike lead the researcher to take a diverse approach: multimethodology in the case of textual research and interdisciplinarity when studying official language. My work is as much in the social sciences as in linguistics, and I am also a thesis supervisor in the field of legal studies.