Geoffrey K Pullum
Professor Emeritus
- Linguistics and English Language
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
Background
Born: Irvine, North Ayr, Scotland. Secondary education: Eltham College. Undergraduate: University of York. Postgraduate: University of Cambridge; University College London. Previously at: University College London; University of Washington; Stanford University; University of California, Santa Cruz. Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1990-91. Co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002). Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, 2005-2006. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003); Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (2007); Fellow of the British Academy (2009).
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
No
Past PhD students supervised
Jim Donaldson
Research summary
general linguistic theory, English grammar, prescriptivism, history and philosophy of linguistics
Current research interests
Foundations of current linguistic theory in 20th-century mathematical logic. Application of model theory to formalization of syntactic descriptions. The syntax of Standard English.Past research interests
Phonetics; phrase structure grammar; mathematical linguistics.Recent publications (newest first):
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2025) The prehistory of generative grammar and Chomsky's debt to Emil Post. Historiographia Linguistica 52(2), 269–303. Published online here (DOI: 10.1075/hl.00186.pul) on 24 October 2025.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2024) Daniel Everett on Pirahã syntax. Chapter 3 of Edward Gibson and Moshe Poliak, eds., From Fieldwork to Linguistic Theory: A Tribute to Dan Everett (Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax series), 23–74. Berlin: Language Science Press. (Title link is to the chapter as published; the entire book is open-access.)
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2024) The Truth About English Grammar. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Blatt, Michael R.; Andreas Draghun; Geoffrey K. Pullum; Barry Bowman; David G. Robinson; and Lincoln Taiz (2024) Does electrical activity in fungi function as a language? Fungal Ecology 68, 101326 (April 2024). Published online 2 January 2024 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.funeco.2023.101326).
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2023): Why grammars have to be normative — and prescriptivists have to be scientific. In Joan Beal, Morana Lucač, and Robin Straaijer, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism, 3–16. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. and Philip Miller (2022): NPs versus DPs: Why Chomsky was right. LingBuzz archive, paper no. 6845. Accessible online at https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/006845
Miller, Philip and Geoffrey K. Pullum (2022): La tête du groupe nominal: l'hypothèse du DP dans les théories génératives. [“The head of the nominal phrase: the DP hypothesis in generative theories.”] In Evelyne Chabert, Laure Gardelle, and Laurence Vincent-Durroux (eds.), La détermination nominale au prisme de plusieurs approches linguistiques, a special issue of Revue CORELA: Cognition, Représentation, Langage, HS-37. OpenEdition Journals. Online at: https://journals.openedition.org/corela/15038
Pullum, Geoffrey K. [溥 哲 夫] (2022): 语言学为什么重要 [wei4 shen2 me yu3 yan2 xue2 zhong4 yao4: Why Linguistics Is Important]. Beijing, China: Peking University Press, July 2022.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2022): Chomsky's forever war. National Review 74 no. 4 (March 7), 36–40. Published online February 17.
Huddleston, Rodney; Geoffrey K. Pullum; and Brett Reynolds (2022): A Student's Introduction to English Grammar, 2nd edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2020): Waiting for Universal Grammar. In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Cognitive Science, ed. by Adam J. Lerner, Simon Cullen, and Sarah-Jane Leslie, 29–43. New York: Routledge.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2020): Theorizing about the syntax of human language: A radical alternative to generative formalisms. Cadernos de Linguística (Brazil) 1(1), 1–33. Online open access at https://cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/cadernos/article/view/279
Sag, Ivan A.; Rui P. Chaves; Anne Abeillé; Bruno Estigarribia; Dan Flickinger; Paul Kay; Laura A. Michaelis; Stefan Müller; Geoffrey K. Pullum; Frank Van Eynde; and Thomas Wasow (2020): Lessons from the English auxiliary system. Journal of Linguistics 56, 87–155. Published online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S002222671800052X
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2019): What grammars are, or ought to be. In Stefan Müller and Petya Osenova (eds.), Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, University of Bucharest, 58–78. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Online at https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/article/view/867/
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2019): Philosophy of linguistics. Chapter 3 of Kelly Michael Becker and Iain Thomson, eds., The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015, 49–59. Cambridge University Press.
Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum (2019): Modern and traditional descriptive approaches to grammar. Chapter 10 of Bas Aarts, Jill Bowie, and Geri Popova (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of English Grammar, 201–221. Oxford University Press.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2019): Formalism, grammatical rules, and normativity. In James McElvenny (ed.), Form and Formalism in Linguistics, 197–223. Berlin: Language Science Press.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2018): Linguistics: Why It Matters. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2018): Intuition and decidability in grammar and number theory. In Beáta Gyuris, Katalin Má, and Gábor Rei (eds.), K + K = 120: Papers dedicated to László Kálmán and András Kornai on the occasion of their 60th birthdays, 445–459. Budapest: MTA Research Institute for Linguistics. (Online version here. HTML here and PDF here.)
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2018): Slurs and obscenities: lexicography, semantics, and philosophy. Chapter 8 of Bad Words: Philosophical Perspectives on Slurs, ed. by David Sosa, 168–192. Oxford University Press.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2017): The usage game: catering to perverts. Chapter 11 of English Usage Guides: History, Advice, Attitudes, ed. by Ingrid Tieken-Boon von Ostade, 177–196. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Title link is to near-final typescript.)
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2017): Theory, data, and the epistemology of syntax. Grammatische Variation: Empirische Zugänge und theorische Modellierung (Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Jahrbuch 2016), ed. by Marek Konopka and Angelika Wöllstein, 283–298. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.