GEOFFREY K. PULLUM  FBA

Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics

School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences
University of Edinburgh

The Truth About English Grammar was published out in the UK on
28 June 2024 and in the rest of the world on 10 September 2024.

Browsables:

Complete publications list
CV, bio, papers and talks
Fear and loathing of the English passive
(HTML version; in Language and Communication, 2014)
The land of the free and The Elements of Style
(HTML version; in English Today, 2010)
Language Log posts 2008–2018
Language Log posts 2003–2008
Posts on Lingua Franca
(formerly on The Chronicle of Higher Education's website; now limited to subscribers)
Remarks on Chomsky's 2011 London lecture (Linguist List, October 2011)
Tom Chivers on grammar Nazis in the Telegraph
Obituary for Ivan Sag (Linguist List, October 2013)

Downloadables (click titles):
Daniel Everett on Pirahã syntax. Chapter 3 of the new Festschrift honoring Daniel Everett. (PDF, 51 pages.)

Control in Free Adjuncts — James Donaldson's PhD dissertation on the so-called 'dangling modifier' construction (completed late 2020, approved and officially dated 2021).

Fear and loathing of the English passive. Language and Communication, 2014. (Single-spaced PDF typescript, 23 pages, or HTML version here.)

Anaphoric one and its implications. (John Payne, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Barbara C. Scholz, and Eva Berlage.) Language 89(4), 2013. (Single-spaced PDF typescript.)

The central question in comparative syntactic metatheory. Mind and Language 28(4): 492-521, 2013. (Uncorrected proofs.)

Consigning phenomena to performance: A response to Neeleman. Mind and Language 28(4): 532-537, 2013. (Uncorrected proofs.)

What to be realist about in linguistic science. Unpublished paper presented at a workshop entitled ‘Foundation of Linguistics: Languages as Abstract Objects’ at the Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina, Braunschweig, Germany, June 25-28, 2015.

Exophoric VP Ellipsis (Philip Miller and Geoffrey K. Pullum, 2013), bibliographical details here. (22-page typescript, A4 paper.)

On the mathematics of Syntactic Structures’, Journal of Logic, Language and Information (2011).

Aural pattern recognition experiments and the subregular hierarchy’ (James Rogers & Geoffrey K. Pullum, 2011). Journal of Logic, Language and Information. (Link: uncorrected proofs.)

Inessential features and expressive power of descriptive metalanguages’ (Geoffrey K. Pullum & Hans-Jörg Tiede, 2010). ‘The land of the free and The Elements of StyleEnglish Today, 2010. PDF version.

The distribution and category status of adjectives and adverbs’ (John Payne, Rodney Huddleston, & Geoffrey K. Pullum, 2010).

The truth about English grammar: rarely pure and never simple’ (2010).

Recursion and the infinitude claim’ (Geoffrey K. Pullum & Barbara C. Scholz, 2010).

Computational linguistics and generative linguistics: The triumph of hope over experience’: Presented at EACL 2009.

For universals (but not for finite state learning) visit the zoo’ (Geoffrey K. Pullum & Barbara C. Scholz, 2009), Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

50 Years of Stupid Grammar AdviceThe Chronicle of Higher Education, 2009.

Lexical categorization in English dictionaries and traditional grammarsZAA, 2009.

Animal pattern-learning experiments: Some mathematical background’ (Unpublished tutorial paper on subregular hierarchy stringset mathematics; Geoffrey K. Pullum & James Rogers, 2006.)

Scooping the loop snooper: a proof that the Halting Problem is unsolvable’ (Proof of halting problem undecidability in verse, in the style of Dr. Seuss, to honour Alan Turing — I swear I'm not making this up.)

Curriculum vitae (20 pp, PDF)

ORCID: 0000-0002-7748-8847. Please note that I have never had any account on X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, or other social media sites. Any such accounts in my name (and there have been some) are fake.

Contact Details


My Chinese name: 溥 哲 夫 (PU3, ZHE2-FU1).

New grammar textbook by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Brett Reynolds (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

 

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Far From The Madding Gerund

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of the English Language
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