He has since published several books on syntax within the framework of generative grammar and the Minimalist Program of Noam Chomsky, a number of which have appeared in the series Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.

In the 1990s, Radford was a pioneer of the maturation-based structure building model of child language, and the acquisition of functional categories in early child English within the principles and parameters framework,[4][5] in which children are seen as gradually building up more and more complex structures, with lexical categories (like noun and verb) being acquired before functional-syntactic categories (like determiner and complementiser); this research resulted in the publication of a monograph titled Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax in 1990, and numerous articles on the acquisition of syntax by monolingual, bilingual, and language-disordered children.

Radford began researching the syntax of colloquial English in 2010, using data recorded from unscripted radio and TV broadcasts.

[8] Radford pursued undergraduate studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, reading Modern Languages (French, Italian and Romanian), Linguistics and Romance Philology.

[10] Working within the principles and parameters framework[11] as his point of departure, and drawing from previous work done by Hagit Borer and Kenneth Wexler[12] on the apparent absence of A-chains in early grammar, Radford proposed a structure-building model focused (inter alia) on the lack of syntactic movement-operations in the early multi-word stage of child English syntax, viz.