Career
He pioneered work in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, and language teaching. This project"s aim was to build corpus-driven lexicons for foreign learners of English. He became chief adviser of Collins" Cobuild English Language Dictionary, whose first edition was published in 1987.
He was well known for having unconventional ideas which helped to advance the young field of corpus linguistics.
At his valedictory lecture in 2000 he stated that none of his many published articles passed successfully through peer-review, and that even an article he had been invited to write for a journal was peer-reviewed by mistake and rejected. This institution provides training courses in corpus linguistics.