Geoffrey Pullum

Geoffrey K. Pullum (born March 8, 1945, in Scotland) is a British and American (naturalized 1987) linguist who specializes in the study of English and has authored more than 300 articles and books. He co-authored The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), which won the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award, co-founded the linguistics blog Language Log, and helped develop generalized phrase structure grammar; he also coined the linguistic terms eggcorn and snowclone. Pullum served as Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh from 2007 to 2020 and is known for criticizing prescriptive grammar rules and linguistic myths, advocating model-theoretic approaches to grammar over generative-enumerative ones and arguing that human languages are no more scientifically definable than human cultures.