: I am starting to wonder whether the module giving finnish language support : (lingsoft) might be the cause?
It's extremeley possible -- the details relaly matter when debugging things like this. Since i don't have any access to these custom plugins, i don't know what they might be doing, or how they might be affecting the terms produced during analysis to explain why you are getting the structure you are -- but one explanation might be if every term produced by them gets a positionIncrement of "0" ... that would tell the query parser to treat them as alternatives -- it's the same thing SynonymFilter does. you'd have to look at the output from the analysis tool ,feeding your example input into the query analyzer to see what terms it produces (and what attributes those terms have). if it is a position increment issue, then you should see the same "OR" style query structure (instead of a phrase query) even if you use the default "lucene" parser and give it a quoted phrase... text_fi:"asuntojen hinnat" -Hoss