I was educated at Cambridge (English Literature), and at the University of Essex (MA and PhD in Theoretical Linguistics). I have been a lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at Essex since 1981. Prior to this I had spent spent two years teaching English in Japan, and a year as a lecturer in Computational Linguistics at UMIST.
My main research interests are in formal and descriptive grammar, especially syntax and semantics, and "Constraint Based" approaches (LFG. HPSG).
Since 2010, I have been Head of Department of Language and Linguistics.