Rodney Huddleston is Professor Emeritus and
at the University of Queensland, St Lucia, in the state of Queensland
in Australia. He was born near Manchester, England, and educated at the
universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. He worked at the universities
of Edinburgh, Reading, and London before moving to Australia to spend
most of his career in the Department of English at the University of
Queensland.
He won one of the first three Excellence in Teaching awards ever given at the University of Queensland in 1988; he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1984; he was promoted to a Personal Chair in Linguistics in 1990; he was elected to Honorary Life Membership of the Australian Linguistic Society in 1998; he was awarded the Centenary Medal by the Australian Federal Government for his services to the humanities in 2003; the Linguistic Society of America voted him an Honorary Life Member in 2005; and in that same year he received honorary Doctor of Literature (D.Lit.) degree from the University of London. He is now Professor Emeritus in the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History at the University of Queensland at St Lucia, near Brisbane.
He has published many articles, and several earlier Cambridge University Press books on English grammar, including Introduction to the Grammar of English (1984), English Grammar: An Outline (1988), and most importantly The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002, co-authored with Geoffrey K. Pullum and others). He worked on The Cambridge Grammar pretty much full time from 1992 to 2002, and when the book finally came out it was awarded the prestigious Leonard Bloomfield Book Award by the Linguistic Society of America in 2004.
His home is at Sunshine Beach, Queensland, in a beach house a near Noosa Heads, adjacent to a national park, and with a view of the sun rising out of the Tasman Sea. He enjoys early morning walks, swimming, and reading the novels of Anthony Trollope.
Geoffrey K. Pullum is Professor Emeritus of
General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and affiliate faculty
in the Department of English at George Mason University in Virginia.
He was born in western Scotland, attended the
University of York and King's College, Cambridge, and ultimately earned
the Ph.D. in General Linguistics at the University of London, where he
served as Lecturer in Linguistics from 1974 to 1980.
He took a leave from London to accept visiting professorships at the
University of Washington and Stanford University during 1980-81,
and fell in love with the West Coast of the USA.
In 1981 he took up a permanent appointment at the University of
California, Santa Cruz, where he served
26 years as Professor of Linguistics (including six years
as Dean of Graduate Studies and Research from 1987 to 1993).
He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in
the Behavioral Sciences in 1990-1991, and at the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in
2005-2006. In 2003 he was elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences and in 2004 he was named Distinguished Professor of
Humanities at UCSC.
He moved to become Professor of General Linguistics at the University
of Edinburgh in 2007.
In 2008 he was elected to the British Academy,
and in 2009 was named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.
He has published books and articles in many areas of linguistics: theoretical syntax, phonetics, Amazonian languages, philosophy of linguistics... and a collection of satirical essays about linguistics under the title The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. In 1996 he began working with Rodney Huddleston and others on what became his best-known work: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, dividing his research time in next five years between California and Queensland (with the result that by the time he was 55 he had seen 60 winters!).
Geoff began his working life as a professional musician in the 1960s, playing piano and Hammond organ in a soul band, but found it much too dull to continue with as a regular job. Being a grammarian proved much more interesting and exciting (he has lectured in 24 different countries and in 26 US states). He does still play the guitar a bit — he owns a Strat, a Telecaster, and a Gretsch 6120 — but it's only a hobby. He currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia, a few miles from Washington DC in the USA.
Brett Reynolds
has held the rank of Professor at Humber College in Toronto, Canada, since
2003. At Humber he specializes in English for academic purposes and the
teaching of English as a second language. He is a past editor of TESL
Ontario's Contact magazine and does research on a variety of topics
in linguistics, ranging from the implications of echolocation for cognitive
science and speech to the use of quantitative approaches to lexical
categorization. He loves to dig around in language data and challenge
assumptions, discovering neat stuff in the process.
Since 2006, he has spent an inordinate amount of time editing the Simple English Wiktionary and Wikipedia and still does so from time to time. He also does a lot of proofreading for the Berlin open access publishing firm Language Science Press.
Brett lived in Japan for ten years. While there he learned to speak Japanese to a very workable level and earned an M.Ed. degree in Teaching English as a Second or Other Language at Temple University in Tokyo. He also founded the Japanese Graded Reader project and is an associate member of the Extensive Reading Foundation, a not-for-profit charitable organization whose purpose is to support and promote extensive reading. He lives just west of Toronto, and in his all-too-brief summers he spends many hours cycling around the western Greater Toronto Area, and has the wounds to prove it.