Geoffrey K. Pullum

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Geoffrey K. Pullum is a theoretical linguist with broad interests in the study of language, including the mathematical and philosophical underpinnings of formal linguistics. He also works on the description of the grammar of English; his recent joint book with Rodney D. Huddleston, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2002), won the 2004 Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Pullum will be working with James Rogers and Barbara C. Scholz on a joint project concerning the logical foundations of syntactic theory. The aim is to reconceptualize explicit theories of grammatical structure in model-theoretic terms rather than in the standard ways, which are based ultimately on proof theory, and to explore and clarify some of the consequences and implications of framing theories in this way.

Pullum received his PhD in general linguistics from the University of London. He worked at University College London from 1974 to 1980, spent 1980–1981 as a visiting professor at the University of Washington and Stanford University, and has worked since 1981 at the University of California at Santa Cruz, serving as dean of graduate studies and research for six years. In 1990–1991, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and in 2003 became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.