Linguistics – Why It Matters: Why It Matters

Geoff Pullum has been interested in linguistics ever since he discovered that there was such a subject. He gave up his job (he was a professional rock musician) and has been studying language ever since. He is currently Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, and formerly worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts, a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He regularly contributes popular articles on language and writing to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Though he has published very widely in many subfields of linguistics, his best-known work is probably The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), a massive reference grammar co-authored with Rodney Huddleston. It won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2004.