Geoffrey K. Pullum is a linguist with broad scholarly interests in language, especially in topics relating to the grammar of English. He was born in the UK in 1945, and worked there and in Europe as a rock musician for some years in the 1960s. He then earned a B.A. in Language with First Class Honours at the University of York (1972), spent a year at King's College, Cambridge, in 1973-74, and received the Ph.D. in General Linguistics from the University of London in 1976. He taught at University College London (1974-1980), the University of Washington (1980-81), and Stanford University (spring 1981), and since 1981 has been a tenured faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

From 1987 to 1993 he served as UCSC's Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, taking a year off for a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1990-91. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He has published over 200 articles and books, ranging from technical syntactic theory to a handbook on phonetic transcription (Phonetic Symbol Guide, second edition 1996) and a collection of satirical essays about the study of language, (The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, 1991). His most recent book is The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, Cambridge University Press, 2002), an 1862-page detailed description of the linguistic structure of international standard English, which revises the traditional description of English in numerous ways and was awarded the the Linguistic Society of America's Leonard Bloomfield Book Award in January 2004. Since then he has published two other books: A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (with Rodney Huddleston; 2005) and Far From the Madding Gerund (with Mark Liberman; 2006).