From 2005 to 2009 he was a senior research associate at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, where he developed the empirical procedure of Corpus Pattern Analysis, which links word meaning to patterns of word use and systematically distinguishes patterns of normal usage from creative uses. After a year in Prague at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Charles University, Prague, he returned to England as lead researcher on the FaNUK project in the Bristol Centre for Linguistics in the University of the West of England (UWE, Bristol), researching the origins, history, and geographical distribution of family names in the UK.