네덜란드 Utrecht대를 졸업하고, 영국 University College London에서 영어학 석사 및 박사 학위를 받았다. UCL의 영어영문학과 교수 겸 영어용례조사연구소(Survey of English Usage) 소장 및 문리대 학장으로 재직 중이다.
[주요저서]
Small clauses in English: the nonverbal types (1992, Mouton de Gruyter),
English syntax and argumentation (1997, Macmillan)
Exploring natural language: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English (with G. Nelson and S. Wallis) (2002, John Benjamins)
The handbook of English linguistics (ed. with A. McMahon) (2006, Blackwell).
Fuzzy grammar: a reader, (ed with D. Denison, E. Keizer and G. Popova) (2004, Oxford University Press,)
Syntactic gradience: the nature of grammatical indeterminacy (2007, Oxford University Press,).
Oxford modern English grammar (2011, Oxford University Press)
The Oxford dictionary of English grammar (with S. Chalker and E. Weiner) (2014, Oxford University Press)
The Oxford handbook of English grammar (2017, Oxford University Press).