I was born in the Netherlands and educated at the University of Utrecht and at UCL, where I obtained an MA and PhD in English Linguistics. I was appointed as a lecturer at UCL in 1989, and to a Chair in 2003.

Since January 1997 I have been the Director of the Survey of English Usage (SEU). The SEU (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage) is an internationally recognised and highly regarded centre of excellence for research in the area of English Language and Linguistics. Founded by Professor the Lord Quirk in 1959, it is housed in the English Department at UCL. The SEU has been engaged in the study of the English language for more more than half a century. Quirk and Greenbaum are two of the authors of the Grammar of Contemporary English (Longman, 1972, with Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik), and the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Longman, 1985, with Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik). These books have long been regarded as the standard reference grammars of Modern English. The Survey is also known for its pioneering work in the area of corpus linguistics. As a full list on the web of publications based on SEU material testifies, countless books, articles and postgraduate theses world-wide have been based on our three English language corpora, which constitute large collections of spoken and written language. These corpora are the Survey of English Usage Corpus, compiled by Quirk, the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), compiled by Greenbaum, and the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE), compiled by Aarts and Wallis. The ICE-GB corpus is a state-of-the art resource for English language studies. It can be searched using the innovative ICECUP software developed at the SEU. The corpus and its associated software is being used in scores of universities world-wide. A book on the ICE project, co-authored by Gerald Nelson Sean Wallis and myself, entitled Exploring natural languge: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English was published in July 2002. The SEU has attracted a large amount of research funding from a variety of sources (the AHRB, the British Academy, the ESRC, the EPSRC, UCL Business, and the Leverhulme Trust, among others).

I am a Founding Editor of the scholarly journal English Language and Linguistics (ELL), which appears four times per year, and is published by Cambridge University Press. ELL is an international journal which focuses on the description of the English language within the framework of contemporary linguistics. The journal is concerned equally with the synchronic and the diachronic aspects of English language studies and publishes articles of the highest quality which make a substantial contribution to our understanding of the structure and development of the English language and which are informed by a knowledge and appreciation of linguistic theory. ELL was awarded a top A-rating in the 2007 and 2011 journals list of the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH). I stepped down as Editor in 2012, and was Reviews Editor of the journal until 2015.