[1] Butt earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1993 at Stanford University.

She is the author or editor of 11 books, including The Structure of Complex Predicates in Urdu, the published version of her Stanford dissertation, and the Theories of Case, a volume in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series.

She is best known for her theoretical linguistic work on complex predicates and on grammatical case,[3] and for her computational linguistic work in large-scale grammar development within the ParGram project.

[4] Her Pargram work in large-scale grammar development focuses on grammars for English, German, and Urdu (Butt et al. 1999).

Butt is also one of the authors of 6000 Kilometer Sehnsucht,[5] which describes her childhood in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.