Alastair Butler is a Researcher based at the Center for the Advancement of Higher Education, Tohoku University, Japan. Before moving to Japan, he was a postdoctoral researcher first in the Institute for Logic Language and Communication at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands and secondly in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of York, England, in 2002. He has published books with Palgrave Macmillan (The Syntax and Semantics of Split Constructions, co-authored with Eric Mathieu, 2004) and Brill Academic Publishers (The Semantics of Grammatical Dependencies, 2012 (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface series).