Brief Biography

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I was born and grew up in Northern Ireland; from 1970-1980 I attended school in Belfast. In 1980, I won a place to read Modern & Medieval Languages at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where I received my BA (Hons) in 1984. Between 1985-1987, I studied for an MA in Philosophy and Psychology of Language at Birkbeck College, University of London, while working as an EFL teacher. I moved to Los Angeles in 1987, obtaining a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California four years later. In the thirty-odd years since then, I have worked at universities in Germany (Heinrich Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf), Canada (McGill University, Montreal), The Netherlands (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Radboud University, Nijmegen (Guest Researcher positions), and the United Kingdom: from 2004-2012, I was a professor in the School of English at the University of Sheffield.

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My publications include a monograph on Irish Syntax - Particles and Projections in Irish Syntax (Kluwer, 1995) - and a fair number of journal articles and chapters, on generative syntax, language acquisition and processing, and language and cognition. In 2018, Cambridge University Press published my second book, titled Reflections on Psycholinguistic Theories: Raiding the Inarticulate. In recent years, my academic output has mostly been divided between research on Vietnamese grammar and on work that deals with the relationship between language and other areas of cognition, especially attention and visual perception. In 2019, I co-edited (with Trang Phan and Tue Trinh), a state of the art volume on Vietnamese grammar - Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vietnamese Linguistics (John Benjamins, 2019).

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Current Status

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I have lived and worked in Kobe (Japan) since September 2010. During 2011-2012, I held a Megumi Visiting Professorship at Kobe College (Nishinomiya), where I taught courses in general and historical linguistics. In April 2012, I took up a permanent position at Konan University, Okamoto, Japan, in the Department of English and American Literature and Language, where I teach a wide range of courses on English and/or General Linguistics.

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In 2024-2025, I will be spending a sabbatical year in England, with an affiliation to University of York.

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