Geoffrey K. Pullum

Geoffrey Keith Pullum (/ˈpʊləm/; born 8 March 1945) is a British and American linguist specialising in the study of English. Pullum has published over 300 articles and books on various topics in linguistics, including phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and philosophy of language. He is Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.[1]

Geoffrey Keith Pullum
Born (1945-03-08) 8 March 1945
Irvine, Scotland
Citizenship
  • British
  • United States (since 1987)
Alma mater
OccupationLinguist
EmployerUniversity of Edinburgh
Known for
TitleEmeritus Professor of General Linguistics
Spouses
  • Joan E. Rainford (1967–93)
  • Barbara C. Scholz (1994–2011)
  • Patricia C. Shannon (2014–2016)
Awards
Websitewww.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/

Pullum is a co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002),[2] a comprehensive descriptive grammar of English. He was co-founder of Language Log and a contributor to Lingua Franca at The Chronicle of Higher Education, often criticizing prescriptive rules and linguistic myths.

Early life

Geoffrey K. Pullum was born in Irvine, North Ayrshire, Scotland, on 8 March 1945, and moved to West Wickham, England, while very young.

Career as a musician

He left secondary school at age 16 and toured Germany as a pianist in the rock and roll band Sonny Stewart and the Dynamos. A year and a half later, he returned to England and co-founded a soul band, Geno Washington & the Ram Jam Band, with Pete Gage, achieving a top 40 single with "Water" and two top 75 singles in 1966.[3]

Education

After the band broke up, Pullum enrolled in the University of York in 1968, graduating in 1972 with a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours. In 1976 he completed a PhD in Linguistics at University College London, where his thesis supervisor was Neil Smith.[4]

Career as a linguist

Pullum's work with Desmond Derbyshire in the last 1970s established the existence of object-initial languages.[5]

Pullum left Britain in 1980, taking visiting positions at the University of Washington and Stanford University. He contributed significantly to the development of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar.[6] In 1983, he and Arnold Zwicky showed that n't is a negative inflectional morpheme, and not simply a contraction of not.[7]

In 1987, he became a United States citizen. He worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1981 to 2007.[8] He was Dean of Graduate Studies and Research from 1987–1993.[9] From 1983–1989, he wrote the regular TOPIC...COMMENT pieces in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.

In 1995, Pullum started to collaborate with Rodney Huddleston and other linguists on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language,[10] which was published in 2022 and won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award of the Linguistic Society of America in 2004.[11]

From 1998 until 2002, he occasionally produced 10 "Lingua Franca" talks for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.[12] In 2000, he published, in the style of Dr. Seuss, a proof of Turing's theorem that the halting problem is recursively unsolvable.[13]

In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences[14] and in 2009 a Fellow of the British Academy.[15] In 2019, he was elected a Member of Academia Europaea.[9]

In 2007, he moved to the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, where he was Professor of General Linguistics and at one time Head of Linguistics and English Language.[9] He became emeritus professor in 2020.[16]

Pullum believes that grammars should be conceptualized model-theoretically, not generatively.[17]

He was the primary doctoral supervisor for Desmond C. Derbyshire and Christopher Potts.

Criticism of Chomsky

Pullum has been a long-time critic of Noam Chomsky, who he accuses of mendacity, plagiarism, and general academically dishonesty.[18] He has attacked the argument from the poverty of the stimulus in multiple publications.[19][20][21] He has called Chomsky's Minimalist Program "really just a repertoire of hints, suggestions, and buzzwords," has said that concepts such as Deep Structure and recursion have "come to nothing," called Chomsky's idea that language arose as a result of a genetic mutation "ut­terly eccentric", and he regretted that Chomsky "turned the discipline of syntactic theory into a personality cult."[18]

Coinings

Pullum has been coined or prompted the cointing of a number of terms that have come to be popularly used including eggcorn, snowclone, and linguification.[22]

Selected publications
  • Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1977). Cole, P.; Sadock, J. M. (eds.). "Word order universals and grammatical relations". Syntax and Semantics. 8: 249–277. doi:10.1163/9789004368866_011.
  • Derbyshire, Desmond C.; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1979). "Object initial languages". Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session. 23 (2). doi:10.31356/silwp.vol23.02.
  • Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1979). Rule interaction and the organization of a grammar. Outstanding dissertations in linguistics. New York: Garland. ISBN 0824096681.
  • Gazdar, Gerald; Klein, Ewan; Pullum, Geoffrey K.; and Sag, Ivan A. (1985). Generalized phrase structure grammar. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. ISBN 0-631-13206-6
  • Pullum, Geoffrey K., and Ladusaw, William A. (1986). Phonetic Symbol Guide, University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226685314, 0226685322
    • 2nd ed (1986). ISBN 0-226-68535-7, 0-226-68536-5.
    • 世界音声記号辞典 (Sekai onsei kigō jiten). Tokyo: Sanseido (2003). ISBN 9784385107561.
  • Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1991). The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language, University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-68534-9. (See also Eskimo words for snow)
  • Huddleston, Rodney D., and Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-43146-8
  • Huddleston, Rodney D.; Pullum, Geoffrey K.; Reynolds, Brett (2022). A student's introduction to English grammar (2 ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 157. ISBN 978-1-009-08574-8.
  • Liberman, Mark, and Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2006). Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from the Language Log, William, James & Company. ISBN 1-59028-055-5
  • Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2018). Linguistics: Why it matters. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 9781509530762

References
  1. "Geoffrey K Pullum". The University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 27 May 2021.
  2. Huddleston, Rodney; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-43146-0.
  3. "GENO WASHINGTON AND HIS RAM JAM BAND | full Official Chart History | Official Charts Company". www.officialcharts.com. Retrieved 2 April 2023.
  4. Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1979). Rule interaction and the organization of a grammar. Internet Archive. New York : Garland Pub. ISBN 978-0-8240-9668-7.
  5. Derbyshire, Desmond C.; Pullam, Geoffrey (1 January 1979). "Object initial languages". Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session. 23 (1). doi:10.31356/silwp.vol23.02. ISSN 0361-4700.
  6. Gazdar, Gerald; Klein, Ewan; Pullum, Geoffrey K.; Sag, Ivan A. (1985). Generalized phrase structure grammar. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-34455-3. OCLC 644797704.
  7. Zwicky, Arnold M.; Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1983). "Cliticization vs. Inflection: English N'T". Language. 59 (3): 502. doi:10.2307/413900.
  8. "Geoffrey K. Pullum: Redirect". people.ucsc.edu. Retrieved 27 May 2021.
  9. "Academy of Europe: Pullum Geoffrey". www.ae-info.org. Retrieved 2 April 2023.
  10. Culicover, Peter W. (2004). "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (review)" (PDF). Language. 80 (1): 127–141. doi:10.1353/lan.2004.0018. ISSN 1535-0665. S2CID 140478848.
  11. "Leonard Bloomfield Book Award Previous Holders". Linguist Society of America. Retrieved 18 August 2015.
  12. "ABC Search". discover.abc.net.au. Retrieved 3 April 2023.
  13. Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2000) "Scooping the loop snooper: An elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem". Mathematics Magazine 73.4 (October 2000), 319–320. A corrected version appears on the author's website as "Scooping the loop snooper: A proof that the Halting Problem is undecidable".
  14. "Geoffrey Keith Pullum". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 27 May 2021.
  15. "Professor Geoffrey K Pullum FBA". The British Academy. Retrieved 27 May 2021.
  16. "Geoffrey K Pullum". The University of Edinburgh. Retrieved 3 April 2023.
  17. Pullum, Geoffrey K. (15 October 2019). "What grammars are, or ought to be". Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. doi:10.21248/hpsg.2019.4. ISSN 1535-1793.
  18. "Chomsky's Forever War". National Review. 17 February 2022. Retrieved 2 April 2023.
  19. Pullum, Geoffrey K. (25 September 1996). "Learnability, Hyperlearning, and the Poverty of the Stimulus". Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 22 (1): 498. doi:10.3765/bls.v22i1.1336. ISSN 2377-1666.
  20. Pullum, Geoffrey K; Scholz, Barbara C (26 January 2002). "Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments". The Linguistic Review. 18 (1–2). doi:10.1515/tlir.19.1-2.9. ISSN 0167-6318.
  21. Scholz, Barbara C; Pullum, Geoffrey K (26 January 2002). "Searching for arguments to support linguistic nativism". The Linguistic Review. 18 (1–2). doi:10.1515/tlir.19.1-2.185. ISSN 0167-6318.
  22. "Denials". Arnold Zwicky's Blog. 18 December 2020. Retrieved 2 April 2023.
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