Geoffrey K. Pullum is a linguist specializing in the study of English, and has published on a wide variety of subjects falling within the scientific study of language, including syntax, phonetics, and the philosophy of linguistics. He is perhaps the only person in the world who is a life member of the Linguistic Society of America, the International Phonetic Association, and the American Philosophical Association.
He was born in Irvine, Scotland in 1945, not because of a Scots heritage, but because his father was flying for the Royal Air Force from an airfield at Turnberry in Ayrshire at the end of the Second World War. He moved to England (West Wickham, in Kent) while still very young.
Elementary school did not go that well, and high school did not go well at all. Although he attended the prestigious Eltham College in south London, he largely wasted that opportunity, finding school insufficiently engaging intellectually. The school for its part found him insufficiently serious about the work they expected of him. (It is possible both were right.) The result was that by the age of 16, he was a high school dropout.
Menial jobs in an industrial laundry and a London bookstore made it look like perhaps there was no further to fall careerwise, but he found a way: he became a piano player in a rock 'n' roll band, Sonny Stewart and the Dynamos, working around Germany doing residencies in bars, nightclubs, and American air bases. After a year and a half he returned to England to join his high school friend, guitarist Pete Gage, in forming a soul band: Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band. The Ram Jam Band travelled all over Britain, appeared on the same bill with artists like the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Rufus ("Walking the Dog") Thomas, and others. They and had some recording success in the middle 1960s. But the tedium of life on the road as a rock musician was ultimately unendurable, and after the break-up of the original Ram Jam Band in 1967, Geoff headed for the glamour and excitement of becoming a linguist.
A year of repair work at the British equivalent of a community college was necessary to patch up his sketchy high school record, but he managed to meet minimum conditions for university entrance and applied to six British universities. He got an offer of admission from just one: the University of York, where the founding professor, Robert B. Le Page made a personal decision to take a chance on him. (Le Page died in January 2005, forty years after starting the department, which still flourishes as an enormous credit to his service to British linguistics.)
Geoff enrolled at York in 1968, and experienced something entirely new: taking intellectual work seriously. In 1972 he earned the B.A. in Language with First Class Honours. He then went on to spend a year as a postgraduate research student at King's College, Cambridge (1973-74), and began teaching linguistics at University College London in 1974 to escape the poverty of graduate student life — he had married in 1967, and now had a wife and son to support. He became an internal candidate for the doctorate at the University of London, and was awarded the Ph.D. in General Linguistics in 1976. His dissertation was entitled Rule Interaction and the Organization of a Grammar (it was published in 1979 by Garland, New York).
While lecturing at University College London one day in 1976, he remarked that there was absolutely no sign in the literature of any genuine candidates for the status of a language with OVS or OSV as the basic order of constituents in the unmarked clause. A newly arrived doctoral student, Desmond C. Derbyshire, was in the audience, and informed him that in fact the Carib language Hixkaryana seemed to have quite rigidly fixed OVS constituent order in simple active declarative clauses. Derbyshire turned out to have been working on Hixkaryana for some fifteen years. This seemed to Geoff a very interesting discovery, and it led him to take a great interest in what Derbyshire had to say, and to become the main supervisor of Derbyshire's research for his 1979 doctoral dissertation on Hixkaryana. Together, Derbyshire and Pullum obtained Social Sciences Research Council funding for joint research on the languages of Amazonia, leading to the publication of the Handbook of Amazonian Languages (vol. 1, 1986; vol. 2, 1990; vol. 3, 1991; vol. 4, 1998). [Derbyshire died at the end of 2007. See this obituary, a version of which was also published on the LINGUIST List.]
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher stormed into power in Britain on a tide of racism. The vote share of the National Front, an openly Nazi party with a significant profile in urban areas, collapsed almost to nothing as the Conservative party took over their anti-immigrant platform and started talking about repatriation of non-white British residents. The black residents of Britain at the time included Geoff's wife and son, the idea of repatriating non-white immigrants that won Thatcher so many votes from the British electorate was not an inviting one. He fled Britain, working for a year at the University of Washington and at Stanford University on visiting positions (1980-81), and then in 1981 was appointed with tenure at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he served as Professor of Linguistics until June 2007.
In the 1980s he developed in interest in computational linguistics, working for several years as a consultant at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories advising on matters relating to natural language processing (trying to make computers understand English: it hasn't happened yet), and collaborated with Gerald Gazdar, Ewan Klein, and Ivan Sag to produce the book Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (1985).
He served from 1987 to 1993 as Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Santa Cruz, a job that is warmly recommended to you if you enjoy being blamed for things you didn't do, being begged for things you haven't got, sitting in meetings with people you don't want to meet, and signing letters you didn't write.
At one point during that period, in 1987, he was invited to the NASA Ames Research Center in his capacity as Dean, but the invitation was withdrawn when the Center learned that he was technically a foreigner in America. This rebuff from the government of his country of residence forced him to realize where he should get his passport status in line with his loyalties. He became an American citizen later that year.
He was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1990-91, and during this time returned to rock music on a semi-professional basis for a while, playing guitar with the Palo Alto rock band Dead Tongues between 1991 and 1993. He has since embarked on two other showbiz ventures: a radio acting career, playing the lead role of Jack Worthing (a.k.a. [plot spoiler!] Ernest Moncrieff) in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest on the KUSP FM radio station in January 1996, and also starring in a short horror film by director Bernadette Wilson called His Eye, which has been shown at several film festivals.
He never had one second of regret about moving his main professional life from show business to academia. As a rock musician, he visited a total of two foreign countries: Germany and France. Being a linguist didn't just bring more travel than being a rock musician, it brought vastly more. As a linguist he has so far been invited to lecture in 22 countries and 22 American states. To be precise: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, and Taiwan (that's 22 countries, just 174 to go), and the US states of Arizona, California, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin (that's 22 states down, 28 to go).
His most important published work is a major grammar of Standard English written jointly with grammarian Rodney Huddleston in collaboration with a number of other linguists: The Cambridge Grammar of English (2002), which won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award of the Linguistic Society of America in 2004. During that year he was named a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at UCSC. For the year 2005-2006 he was the Constance E. Smith Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. In 2007 he was named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, and in 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
He is a regular contributor to Language Log, the most popular linguistics blog on the web; he writes occasional popular articles on language; he gives occasional popular talks on Australian radio; in February 2005 he published a new grammar textbook jointly with Rodney Huddleston; and in May 2006 a book of pieces from Language Log appeared: Far From the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log, by Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum.
Geoff was married to the philosopher Barbara C. Scholz from 1994 until her death. Together they did a significant amount of joint research on the philosophy of the cognitive and linguistic sciences, the theoretical bases of developmental psycholinguistics, and the technical area of model-theoretic syntax. In the summer of 2007 they both moved to the University of Edinburgh, where Barbara was an Honorary Fellow in Philosophy until her death in May 2011. Geoff is Professor of General Linguistics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences.
Geoff lives in the New Town in Edinburgh (they didn't even start it until the late 1700s, and that counts as new in this ancient city). He has one son by his first marriage: Calvin James Pullum, a software engineer, who lives in Portland, Oregon.
In July 2012 he began work as Gerard Visiting Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University in Providence (RI), USA. He is at Brown from August to January and at Edinburgh from January to July.