I retired from the University of Essex in Autumn of 2017, after 36 years as a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, and finally a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Language and Linguistics
I was educated at Cambridge (Emmanuel College, English Literature), and at the University of Essex (MA and PhD in Theoretical Linguistics). In between Cambridge and Essex I spent two years teaching English in Japan.
Early in my career I spent a year as a lecturer in Computational Linguistics at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. I subsequently held visiting positions at the University of Paris Diderot (Paris 7) (2004) and The University of Tokyo (2016).
Latterly, my main research interests were in formal and descriptive grammar, especially syntax and semantics, and "Constraint Based" approaches (LFG, HPSG), but in the 1980s I did a lot of work on Machine Translation, especially in the Eurotra project and some of its follow-ups.