Pullum's work in the 1970s with
Desmond Derbyshire, for whom he was the primary doctoral supervisor, established the existence of
object-initial languages. He took a position as a Lecturer at University College London in 1974, while still a graduate student at Cambridge University. Pullum left Britain in 1980, taking visiting positions at the
University of Washington and
Stanford University. In 1981, he was appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, where he worked from 1981 to 2007. He was Dean of Graduate Studies and Research from 1987 to 1993. From 1983 to 1989, he wrote the regular "Topic Comment" pieces in
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. He contributed significantly to the development of
Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. In 1983, he and
Arnold Zwicky showed that ''
n't is a negative inflectional morpheme, and not simply a contraction of not
. In 1995, Pullum started to collaborate with Rodney Huddleston and other linguists on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language'', which was published in 2002 and won the
Leonard Bloomfield Book Award of the
Linguistic Society of America in 2004. From 1998 until 2002, he produced 10 "Lingua Franca" talks for the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2000, he published, in the style of
Dr. Seuss, a proof of
Turing's theorem that the
halting problem is recursively unsolvable. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004,
Barbara Scholz, Pullum, and James Rogers initiated a group project on the applications of
model theory in syntax, which was supported by the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at
Harvard University in 2005–2006. In 2007, he moved to the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences,
University of Edinburgh, where he was Professor of General Linguistics and at one time Head of Linguistics and English Language. and, in 2019, a Member of
Academia Europaea.
Views Linguistic theory Pullum argues against the view that the "languages"—in the sense of entities like Romanian or English—are scientifically and concretely definable objects. It seems to me that the notion of 'a language' should not be regarded as scientifically reconstructable at all. We can say in very broad terms that a human language is a characteristic way of structuring expressions shared by a speech community; but that is extremely vague, and has to remain so. The vagueness is ineliminable, and unproblematic. Human languages are no more scientifically definable than human cultures, ethnic groups, or cities. The most we can say about what it means to say of a person that they speak Japanese is that the person knows, at least to some approximation, how to structure linguistic expressions in the Japanese way (with object before verb, and postpositions, and so on). But in scientific terms there is no such object as 'Japanese'.Nevertheless, it does not follow for Pullum that an externalist notion of 'language' cannot in principle be an object of scientific study (cf. Chomsky's perspective that the only scientifically interesting conception of language is an internalist one). Instead, Pullum justifies a conception of the grammar that makes claims directly about linguistic expressions, as opposed to sets of such expressions. This approach stands in contrast to a
generative-enumerative (or
proof-theoretic) conception under which a grammar is a recursive procedure that defines a set of well-formed expressions—that is, the full set of expressions that are well-formed in the 'language', and no-more. The upshot of that is model-theoretic grammars, unlike generative-enumerative grammars, remain silent on the cardinality of the set of well-formed sentences according to the grammar.Grammars of this sort [MTS] are entirely independent of the numerosity of expressions... The constraints are satisfied by expressions with the relevant structure whether there are infinitely many of them, or a huge finite number, or only a few.” Monotonic phrase-structure grammars are based on the idea that the structure of sentences can be represented as a hierarchy of constituents, with each level of the hierarchy corresponding to a different level of grammatical organization. X-bar theory is a specific type of phrase-structure grammar that posits a uniform structure for all phrasal categories, with each phrase containing a "head" and optional specifier and/or complement. The key difference between monotonic phrase-structure grammars and generative grammars like transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is the absence of transformations or movement operations in the former. Monotonic grammars maintain that the structure of a sentence remains fixed from its initial formation, whereas generative grammars propose that sentences can undergo various transformations during the derivation process. Pullum argues that the traditional notion of a
noun phrase is correct, and that the so-called
DP hypothesis is mistaken. He believes that some kind of fusion of functions accounts for some of the data leading to the disagreement.
Criticism of Chomsky Pullum has been a long-time critic of
Noam Chomsky, whom he accuses of mendacity, plagiarism, and general academic dishonesty. He has attacked the argument from the
poverty of the stimulus in multiple publications. He has called Chomsky's
Minimalist Program "really just a repertoire of hints, suggestions, and buzzwords", has said that concepts such as
Deep Structure and
Recursion have "come to nothing", called Chomsky's idea that language arose as a result of a genetic mutation "utterly eccentric", and regretted that Chomsky "turned the discipline of syntactic theory into a personality cult". and
linguification. == Selected publications ==