Rodney Huddleston is Professor Emeritus and
Honorary Research Consultant 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 other linguists). 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 house adjacent to a national park with a view of the sun rising out of the Tasman Sea beach near Noosa Heads. His life there with his wife Vivienne involves early morning walks, swimming, studying English grammar, writing articles, and reading the novels of Anthony Trollope.
Geoffrey K. Pullum is Professor of
General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
He was born in Scotland, got his B.A. degree at the University of York
in England, and earned the Ph.D. in General Linguistics at the University
of London, where he served as Lecturer in Linguistics at University College
London from 1974 to 1981. For the last of those years, 1980 to 1981, he
was on leave as College Visiting Professor at the University of Washington,
and taught one quarter at Stanford University.
He then took up a permanent appointment at Santa Cruz, where he served
25 years as Professor of Linguistics (including six years
as Dean of Graduate Studies and Research from 1987 to 1993).
He took a sabbatical year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in
the Behavioral Sciences in 1990-1991, and another as a Fellow of the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in
2005-2006. In 2003 he was elected to membership of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences and in 2004 he was named Distinguished Professor of
Humanities. He moved to Edinburgh in 2007, joining the Linguistics and
English Language department within the School of Philosophy, Psychology,
and Language Sciences.
He has published very widely within linguistics. His books include works ranging from theoretical syntax (Rule Interaction and the Organization of a Grammar in 1979; Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, with Gerald Gazdar, Ewan Klein, and Ivan Sag in 1985) to the description of the languages of the Amazon (Handbook of Amazonian Languages, 4 volumes, edited with Desmond C. Derbyshire, 1986 to 1998). The best known of his books are Phonetic Symbol Guide (with William A. Ladusaw, second edition, University of Chicago Press, 1996) and a collection of satirical essays about language and linguists called The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (University of Chicago Press, 1991). In 1996 he began working with Rodney Huddleston on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and A Student's Introduction to English Grammar, and divided his research time between California and Queensland between 1996 and 2001.
Geoff actually started out as a professional rock musician, but found it too dull to continue with as a regular job. Being a grammarian proved more interesting and exciting. He now lives in the New Town area of Edinburgh (called new because it was only planned and built starting in the 1700s!). His hobbies include walking around Edinburgh and admiring its architecture; reading about mathematical logic and finite model theory; occasional acting (so far one performance in a radio play and a short film); and writing popular articles about language and linguistics, such as his radio talks for Australia's ABC Radio National and about 600 posts so far on the most popular linguistics blog on the Internet, Language Log (you can see a list of those if you click here).