Professor Geoffrey Pullum
Professor of General Linguistics and Head of Linguistics and English Language, University of Edinburgh (H4) The grammar of contemporary Standard English; general descriptive and theoretical linguistics; applications of logic and mathematics to the formalization of syntactic theories; philosophy of linguistic science
My B.A. in Language at the University of York (1972) was earned in the department founded by Robert B. Le Page, a pioneer of the study of Caribbean creole languages. After I graduated, Le Page gave me a year as a Teaching Fellow (1972-73) under the flattering assumption that I could help replace the teaching of my mentor, Dr. David A. Reibel during his sabbatical. Then, as a research student at Cambridge (1973-74), I attended a rewarding summer school at the University of Massachusetts (1974) with the generous support of King's College. In 1974, I took a lecturing job at University College London, and registered for the Ph.D., which I earned in 1976 under Neil Smith. In 1980 my life in UK academia was then interrupted for a quarter of a century. I was invited to teach for at the University of Washington and Stanford University (1980-81), and discovered the appeal of the Pacific coast of North America. I accepted a post at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and over the following years the Department of Linguistics there gradually built a reputation as one of the top three or four in the USA. I became Professor of Linguistics, served for six years as Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, and spent rewarding sabbaticals at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1990-91) and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2005-06). From 1996 on, I spent several months each year in Australia to work with Professor Rodney Huddleston FBAon The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, a project that was the most exciting of my life. The book was published in 2002 and won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award of the Linguistic Society of America in 2004. I accepted the post of Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 2007, and people who knew my birthplace started asking me what it was like to be 'back. It didn't seem like 'back'. True, I was born in Ayrshire, but purely through the accident of my English parents' wartime location. I had grown up in England. My discovery of Edinburgh's remarkable intellectual and cultural life has been the experience not of a returning son of the soil, but rather of a visiting American (I am married to an American philosopher who is also an Edinburgh enthusiast). My move in 2007 certainly seems to me the best I ever made. The Linguistics and English Language subject area that I now head -- within a flourishing School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences -- is the largest of its kind in the UK, and top in research power according to the 2008 RAE. This was all the honour I expected to have. The out-of-the-blue communication that told me I was in line for a British Academy Fellowship was a total surprise. It is and a great and humbling privilege to be counted among the members of such a distinguished institution. | 
