Geoffrey K. Pullum FBA

Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics

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

The Truth About English Grammar
published September 2024

Some 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)
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 Unpublished paper presented at a workshop entitled ‘Foundation of Linguistics: Languages as Abstract Objects’ at the Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina,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, I have never had any account on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, or other social media sites. Any such accounts in my name (and there have been some) are fake.


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

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