1972
From formal to substantive phonology: the demise of the `Meccano Set' proposal. Department of Language, University of York, November 1972.
1973
The relevance and irrelevance of linguistics to second language teaching. Department of Linguistics and Contemporary English Language, University of Lancaster, May 1973.
1974
The stress pattern of Spanish preterites. Romance Linguistics Seminar II, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, January 1974.
`Stupidity', `blinkering', and related concepts in the theory of grammar. Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, February 1974.
General conditions on reduced coordinations. Linguistics Association of Great Britain, Spring Meeting, Hatfield College of Technology, April 1974.
(1) Three topics in Spanish phonology.
(2) Universal grammar and natural history.
Department of Language, University of York, May 1974:
1975
Sequential and simultaneous rule application in Spanish phonology. Romance Linguistics Seminar III, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, January 1975.
Syntax and phonology: when an NP is there and when it isn't. Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, March 1975.
The Duke of York gambit. Linguistics Association of Great Britain, Spring Meeting, University of Nottingham, April 1975.
Black holes in syntax. Department of Language, University of York, May 1975.
Word order universals and grammatical relations. Department of Linguistics, University of Birmingham, October 1975.
1976
Truth-functional connectives in natural language. [Gerald Gazdar and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented jointly.] Linguistics Association of Great Britain, Spring Meeting, University of Edinburgh, April 1976.
1977
Successive cyclicity and the theory of traces. Amsterdam Colloquium on Bounded and Unbounded Transformations, University of Amsterdam, April 1977.
(1)
Word order universals: some new evidence;
(2)
The `trace theory of movement rules': a critique;
(3)
Implications of the analysis of auxiliaries;
(4)
How wh-movement rules work.
Institute for General Linguistics, University of Salzburg (Austria); May 1977.
Traces and the description of English complementizer contraction. [Paul M. Postal and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented by Pullum.] Linguistics Association of Great Britain, Autumn Meeting, University College London, November 1977.
When semantics isn't semantics: the appeal to interpretive rules. Department of Language, University of York (England); November 1977.
Relational syntax and the nonexistence of semantic anomaly. Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex (England); November 1977.
Anomaly, anaphora, and the paradoxes of self-reference. Cognitive Studies Program, School of Social Sciences, University of Sussex (England); December 1977. Also at Workshop on Formal Semantics of Natural Language, University of Tubingen, Germany, December 1977.
1978
Universal determination of syllable division. Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex (England); April 1978.
Object initial languages. [Desmond C. Derbyshire and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented by Pullum.] Linguistic Society of America, Summer Meeting, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, July 1978.
Local processes associated with the infinitival complementizer to. Amsterdam Colloquium on Local Processes, University of Amsterdam, April 1978.
1979
Language, libel, and the linguist. Special one-hour address to the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Hull, April 1979.
Appositive relatives, anaphora, and the nature of logical form. Conference on the Nature of Syntactic Representation. Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, May 1979.
Remarks on what might refute surface grammar. Workshop on Base Generation, Semantic Interpretation, and Interpretive Filtering: the Case of Comparatives. University of Sussex, July 1979.
A context-free phrase structure grammar for the English auxiliary system. [Gerald Gazdar, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Ivan A. Sag. Presented by Sag.] Auxiliaries Festival, Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Institute, Salzburg, Austria, August 1979.
The object-initial tendency in Amerindian languages of the Amazon basin. [Desmond C. Derbyshire and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented by Derbyshire.] Forty-Third International Congress of Americanists, Vancouver, B. C., Canada, August 1979.
Universal grammar and the alleged "AUX" category in Luise'n~'o. Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Sussex, September 1979.
There is no `AUX': not in Luiseño, not in English. Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, November 1979.
1980
Respectively, incorporation, and comparatives: three famous arguments against context-free phrase structure grammar. (Joint presentation with Gerald Gazdar.) Department of Language, University of York, January 1980.
VSO, OSV, VP, & PSG. Workshop on Syntax, Morphology, and Parsing. University of Sussex, July 1980.
Auxiliary hypotheses. Groningen Round Table Conference on Auxiliaries, Groningen, Holland, July 1980.
The phrase structure backlash. Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, August 1980.
Subject-aux inversion-without subject, aux, or inversion. [Gerald Gazdar, Ivan A. Sag, and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented by Gazdar.] Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Surrey, September 1980.
The category status of infinitival to. Linguistic Society of America, Annual Meeting, San Antonio, Texas, December 1980.
Comments on the two central claims of "trace theory." [Geoffrey K. Pullum and Robert D. Borsley. Presented by Pullum.] Linguistics Association of Great Britain, Spring Meeting, University of Birmingham, March 1980.
1981
Object initial languages and their theoretical implications. Board of Studies in Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California; January 1981.
On constituent-command. Department of Linguistics, UCLA, Los Angeles, California; January 1981.
Some properties of natural languages that follow from the theory of phrase structure. Department of Lingistics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada); February 1981.
The context-freeness of human languages. Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego, California; May 1981.
Language, libel, and the linguist. Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, California; May 1981.
Generalized phrase structure grammar. (A course of six presentations given jointly with Gerald Gazdar and Ivan A. Sag.) Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California; June 1981.
Free word order and phrase structure rules. North Eastern Linguistic Society, Annual Meeting, MIT, November 1981.
Word order typology and phrase structure rules. Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, California; November 1981.
Subcategorization, constituent order, and the notion "head." [Gerald Gazdar and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented by Pullum.] Linguistic Society of America, Annual Meeting, New York, December 1981.
Cliticization versus inflection: English n't. [Arnold M. Zwicky and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented by Zwicky.] Linguistic Society of America, Annual Meeting, New York, December 1981.
1982
Coordination and transformational grammar. [Gerald Gazdar, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Ivan A. Sag, and Thomas Wasow. Presented by Gazdar.] Spring Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Reading, March 1982. Also presented (by Gazdar) at the conference on Syntactic Theory and How People Parse Sentences, Ohio State University, May 1982.
Deleting named morphemes. [Arnold M. Zwicky and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented jointly.] Summer Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, University of Maryland, July 1982. (Read by Zwicky.)
How many possible human languages are there? Summer Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, University of Maryland, July 1982.
Processing English with a generalized phrase structure grammar. [Jean Mark Gawron, Jonathan King, John Lamping, Egon Loebner, Anne Paulson, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Ivan A. Sag, and Thomas Wasow. Presented by Gawron.] Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, June 1982.
The return of phrase structure grammar: implications for psychology. Experimental Psychology Program, University of California, Santa Cruz, California; February 1982.
Remarks on categories and features. Workshop on Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, August 5, 1982.
Generative capacity rides again: implications of mathematical results for linguistics. University of California, Berkeley, California; November 1982.
The syntax-phonology boundary and current syntactic theories. [Geoffrey K. Pullum and Arnold M. Zwicky. Presented by Pullum.] Annual Meeting, Linguistic Society of America, San Diego, California, December 1982. (Read by Pullum.)
1983
Context-freeness and the computer processing of human languages. Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 1983.
Foot features and parasitic gaps. [Gerald Gazdar, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Ewan Klein, and Ivan A. Sag. Presented by Gazdar.] CODOC Conference on Complementation, Brussels, June 1983.
The elimination of phrase structure rules: it hasn't happened yet. Workshop on Phrase Structure Rules, University of California, Los Angeles, July 1983.
Eliminating phrase structure rules? University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois; University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa; University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin; and University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta (Canada); September 1983.
Capturing constituent order generalizations in GPSG. University of California, Santa Barbara, California; November 1983.
1984
Apology for the Synopsis: GPSG made clearer (and better). Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; January 1984.
Phonological resolution of syntactic feature conflict. [Geoffrey K. Pullum and Arnold M. Zwicky. Presented jointly.] Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Baltimore MD, December 27-31. (Read by Pullum.)
Military funding of linguistic research: moral and practical issues. Symposium on Military Applications of Linguistic Theory, Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Baltimore MD, December 27-31.
Logic, syntax, and grammatical agreement. Invited presentation in the panel on The Role of Logical Grammar in GPSG at the Matsuyama Workshop on Formal Grammar (4th Japan-Korea Workshop, organized by the Logico-Linguistic Society of Japan and the Linguistic Society of Korea), Matsuyama, Japan, December 17-19.
Phrase structure descriptions of some non-straightforward agreement systems. Invited presentation at the Conference on Agreement, Stanford University, October 1984.
How complex could an agreement system be? Invited presentation at the First Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, Ohio State University, September 1984.
Syntactic and semantic parsability. Invited presentation at the Tenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics/Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, Stanford University, July 1984.
Three lectures on generalized phrase structure grammar. Information-technology Promotion Agency, Tokyo (Japan); December 1984.
GPSG as a framework for executing GB ideas. Sophia University, Tokyo (Japan); December 1984.
Natural language processing with a generalized phrase structure grammar: the HPSG system. Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT), Tokyo (Japan), December 1984.
1985
The computational tractability of generalized phrase structure grammars. Linguistic Society of America, Annual Meeting, Seattle, Washington, December 1985.
Generalized phrase structure grammar for nonlinguists. Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, California; February 1985.
(1) Grammar, computation, and cognition: some wider implications
of generalized phrase structure grammar.
(2) Phrase structure grammar with no phrase structure rules.
University of Colorado, Boulder; March 1985:
Generalized phrase structure grammar and natural language processing. IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York; March 1985.
Generalized phrase structure grammar: five lectures. Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; March 1985.
Human and non-human languages. University of Victoria, British Columbia (Canada); October 1985.
Learnability and grammatical theory. Invited presentation at the Western States Conference On Linguistics (WECOL) meeting, University of Victoria, British Columbia, November 1985.
Assuming some version of X-bar theory. Invited presentation at the 21st Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago, Illinois, April 25-27.
Natural language interfaces with strategic computing. Conference on Strategic Computing, University of California, Santa Cruz, March 2-3.
1986
Why linguistic theory is not a theory of the human capacity for language. University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii; March 1986.
IDC-command, X-bar theory, and the concept of government. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Seattle, Washington.
The non-biological basis of linguistic theory. UCLA, Los Angeles, California; April 1986.
Five lectures on applications of linguistic theory to the syntax of Amazonian languages. University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon; August 1987.
1987
Plain morphology and expressive morphology. [Arnold M. Zwicky and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented jointly.] Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, California, February 13-15. (Read by Zwicky.)
Expletive noun phrases and movement to subcategorized positions. [Paul M. Postal and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented by Pullum.] West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Tucson, Arizona, March 20-22.
Category structures, feature cooccurrence, and the computational utility of various types of phrase structure grammar. Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; October 1987.
Obligatorily extraposed irrealis clauses: an undocumented construction in English, and its theoretical implications. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, and Cornell Linguistic Circle, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; October 1987.
Endocentricity and the nominal gerund. Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; October 1987.
UNIX for linguists. Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, California; October 1987.
Human and non-human languages. University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky; December 1987.
Dummies and movers in subcategorized positions. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois; December 1987.
Obligatorily extraposed irrealis clauses in English. Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, Columbus, Ohio, October 2-4.
The smallest command relation. Linguistic Society of America, Annual Meeting, San Francisco, December 27-30. [Geoffrey K. Pullum and Chris Barker. Presented by Pullum.]
Endocentricity and the nominal gerund. Linguistic Society of America, Annual Meeting, San Francisco, December 27-30.
1988
Linguistics as a cognitive science: four roadblocks. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia (Canada); May 1988.
Dummy objects and the return of Raising. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada); May 1988.
(1) Alternatives to a biologistic foundation for linguistic theory;
(2) Heterocategorial heads and the English nominal gerund construction.
The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; October 1988.
Why linguistic theory is not biologically based. University of California, Davis, California; November 1988.
1989
Its that don't mean it, ifs that don't mean if. University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado; February 1989.
Biology, bureaucracy, and bar level. Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen, Holland; August 1989.
Capturing generalizations about phrase structure. Rice University, Houston, Texas; October 1989.
(1) English as the "official language" of the United States:
a linguistic and political critique.
(2) Universal and parochial generalizations about phrase structure.
California State University, Fresno; February 1989.
Noun phrases, gerunds, and extraposition. Syntax and Semantics Seminar, Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles; February 1989.
Misconceiving morphology: a response to Bromberger and Halle's "Conceptual issues in morphology." [Arnold M. Zwicky and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented jointly.] Workshop on the Foundations of Phonology and Morphology, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, Stanford, California, January 26-28.
Unknown vowels and uncharted space. [Geoffrey K. Pullum and William A. Ladusaw. Presented jointly.] Centennial Celebration meeting, American Dialect Society, Berkeley, California, May 6.
Linguistic theories and linguistic engineering. Invited address at Kyung Hee International Conference on Linguistic Studies, Kyung-Hee University, Seoul, Republic of Korea, August 9-12. Section coordinator's plenary presentation at the Convention of the International Phonetic Association, Kiel, West Germany, August 17-20.
Prospects for generative grammar in the 1990s. Invited address at the Western States Conference On Linguistics (WECOL), Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, October 13-15.
1990
Serial verbs in colloquial English. Invited presentation at the Ohio State Miniconference on Serial Verbs, Columbus, Ohio, May 1990.
Capturing generalizations about phrase structure. Summer Institute of Linguistics, International Linguistic Center, Dallas, Texas; April 1990.
The quasi-serial verb construction GO GET in modern English. Syntax Workshop, Stanford University, Stanford, California; November 1990.
1991
An electronic edition of Phonetic Symbol Guide. [George D. Allen, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and William A. Ladusaw. Presented by Allen.] XIIth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, August 19-24, 1991, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Condition duplication, paradigm homonymy, and transconstructional constraints. [Geoffrey K. Pullum and Arnold M. Zwicky. Presented jointly.] Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Berkeley, California, February 1991.
A misconceived approach to morphology. [Geoffrey K. Pullum and Arnold M. Zwicky. Presented jointly.] Tenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, March 1991.
The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax. Eötvös Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary, July 1991.
Verb sequences in English and how to inflect them: implications for linguistic theory. Linguistics Program, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; November 1991.
Cognition, innateness, language, and race. Department of Philosophy, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; November 1991.
1992
Adjacency and complement inflection constraints. Annual Meeting, Linguistic Society of America, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 1992.
Eskimos, immigrants, and engineers: attitudes toward strangers in California society. Temple Beth-El Synagogue, Soquel, California; March 1992.
The origins of the cyclic principle. Invited address at the Parassession on the Cycle, Twenty-Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago, Illinois, April 1992.
Panel contribution at the 33rd annual meeting of the Association of College and Research Libraries, Rare Books and Manuscripts Preconference on Scholarly Communication and the Future of Special Collections, University of California, Santa Cruz, June 1992.
The lighter side of being a linguist. Student Linguistic Association, the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; April 1992.
Languages, minds, and abstract objects: platonism versus realism in the philosophy of linguistics. University of Pittsburgh, October 1992, and University of California, Santa Cruz, November 1992.
1993
Language, mind, and abstract objects. [Geoffrey K. Pullum and Barbara C. Scholz. Presented jointly.] Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Los Angeles, California, January 1993.
(1) Alien tongues: How strange could a language be?
(2) The case of the nominal gerund.
Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, November 1993.
1994
Evaluative applications of linguistics. New York University, New York, NY, November 1994.
1995
Will our robots understand us? The mathematical linguistic tightrope. [Title listed on preliminary program as 'Mathematical properties of natural languages.'] Presented in the symposium on 'Linguistic Science and Language Technology: Machines and Human Language' at the 1995 AAAS Annual Meeting and Science Innovation Exposition, "Unity in Diversity" (161st National Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), Atlanta, Georgia, February 1995.
Lexical and syntactic properties that keep the parsing problem tractable. Institute for Research in Cognitive Science and Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA, May 1995.
Eskimo words for snow: What are the actual facts? And what implications could they have for the psychology of human categorization? Institute for Cognitive Science, University of Southampton, England, May 1995.
Five reasons for not believing the computational complexity arguments about the difficulty of parsing human languages. School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, England, June 1995.
1996
Enter a new headed morphological structure; exit a mythical contraction rule. [Geoffrey K. Pullum and Arnold M. Zwicky. Presented by Pullum.] Annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Diego, California, January 1996.
Functional restriction: English possessives. [Arnold M. Zwicky and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented by Zwicky.] Annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, San Diego, California, January 1996.
Hyperlearning, complexity, learnability, and stimulus poverty. Invited presentation at the Parasession on 'The Role of Learnability in Grammatical Theory', 22nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, University of California, Berkeley, California, February 1996.
The phonetic definition of 'nasal': evidence from Austronesian phonology. [Rachel Walker and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented jointly.] 3rd Annual Meetings of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association, Los Angeles, California, May 1996.
Glottal nasals. [Rachel Walker and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented jointly.] TREND VI: Sixth Trilateral Phonology Weekend, Stanford University, Stanford, California, May 1996.
Identifying the failure of the Argument from Poverty of the Stimulus. Annual Meeting of the Australasian Association for Philosophy, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, July 1996.
Tacit assumptions in the philosophy of linguistics.
Two invited presentations at the
Symposium on Tacit Assumptions in Linguistics
organized by Suomen kielitieteellinen yhdistys
[the Linguistics Association of Finland], September 1996.
Lecture 1:
Theoretical linguistics and the ontology of linguistic structure.
Lecture 2:
Theoretical linguistics and the epistemology of language acquisition.
Invited commentary presented at Winter Workshop on Optimality Theory, Stanford University, December 1996.
Language, world view, and reality: how many words do Eskimos really have for snow, and what implications could that possibly have? McPherson Center for Art and History, Santa Cruz, California, March 1996.
Making English as the official language of the United States: the linguistics and the politics, the stupidity and the danger. Cabrillo College, Aptos, California, May 1996.
English as the `official language' of the United States: a linguistic and political critique. Department of English, University of Queensland, Australia, July 1996.
The ontology of linguistic theories: languages, minds, and abstract objects. Department of Philosophy, University of Queensland, Australia, July 1996.
Strong and weak forms of function words in English: the solution to the riddle of their distribution. Center for Language Teaching Research, University of Queensland, Australia, July 1996.
The many truths of the many Eskimo words for snow: a look at the actual facts and their implications. Department of English, University of Queensland, Australia, August 1996.
The therapy verbs: the morpholexical nature of to-contraction. Department of Linguistics, The Australian National University, July 1996.
1997
Licensing of prosodic features by syntactic rules: the key to auxiliary reduction. [Geoffrey K. Pullum and Arnold M. Zwicky. Presented jointly.] Annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Chicago, Illinois, January 1997. Reading text of the paper available here. (The submitted abstract of this paper was chosen by the Linguistic Society of America's Executive Committee to be displayed as a model conference abstract, with a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of its structure, alongside an unacceptable version of it with roughly the same content (a real stinker) that was prepared by Amy Dahlstrom and John Kingston to illustrate the sort of abstract that the LSA tends to reject. The abstract comparison pages appear not to have been preserved on the LSA site where they used to be, but you can see the two analyzed abstracts here.)
Comments on the workshop. International Workshop on Valency-Changing Derivations, Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia, August 1997.
The alleged poverty of the stimulus in language acquisition: a new source of evidence. 11th Australian Speech and Language Conference, Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, November 1997.
1998
The language instinct issue and the so-called `logical problem of language acquisition'. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, May 1998.
Fear and loathing in Oakland: the linguistics and politics of "Ebonics". Linguistics Research Seminar, Department of English, University of Queensland, Australia, August 1998. Fear and loathing in Oakland: the linguistics and politics of "Ebonics". School of Languages and Linguistics, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia, August 1998.
1999
Formal linguistics and the ordinary working grammarian. Presented at the Mid-America Linguistics Conference, University of Kansas, Lawrence KS, October 1999.
2000
Searching for a case of hyperlearning. Presented at TABU-day 2000, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, June 2000.
Making syntax explicit: neglected alternatives in the philosophy of linguistics. [Barbara C. Scholz and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented jointly.] AAP2000: annual meeting of the Australasian Association for Philosophy, University of Queensland, St Lucia (near Brisbane), July 2000.
Frameworks and languages. [With Barbara C. Scholz; presented jointly.] Chicago Linguistic Society Monthly Meeting, February 17, 2000, and Department of Linguistics colloquium, The Ohio State University, February 18, 2000.
Partial ungrammaticality, lexical novelties, and learnability. [With Barbara C. Scholz; presented by Pullum.] Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, June 2000.
2001
The evolution of structure and the etiology of linguistic universals. From Signals to Structured Communication: Cognitive Science conference, Cornell University, May 2001.
The Big-Bag-o'-Words view of language, and some related errors. CogLunch, Stanford University, Stanford CA, October 2001.
Two applications of logic, two conceptions of natural language. [Geoffrey K. Pullum and Barbara C. Scholz. Presented by Pullum.] Tenth Annual CSLI Workshop on Logic, Language and Computation, Stanford University, May 2001.
On the distinction between model-theoretic and generative-enumerative syntactic frameworks. [Geoffrey K. Pullum and Barbara C. Scholz. Presented by Pullum.] LACL 2001: 4th Annual Conference on Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, Le Croisic, France, June 2001.
Formal grammars without formal languages: the surprisingly radical implications of model-theoretic syntax. Invited keynote address at the symposium on model-theoretic syntax, Formal Grammars / Mathematics of Language conference, Helsinki, Finland, August 2001.
2002
Categorizing anomalous lexical items in English. Linguistics and Phonetics Conference 2002, Meikai University, Urayasu, Japan. September 2002.
English grammar for the 21st century: Time for an exorcism. Keynote address at the 41st annual meeting of the Japan Association of College English Teachers, Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan. September 2002.
Generative grammar, gradient ungrammaticality, and model-theoretic syntax [With Barbara C. Scholz; presented jointly.] Department of Linguistics Colloquium, University of California, Santa Cruz, January 2002.
Supporting linguistic nativism: arguments from stimulus poverty. [With Barbara C. Scholz; presented by Pullum.] Colloquium on Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus, Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford CA, January 2002.
Recasting English grammar: Why the tradition needed revision. Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, and Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain, November 2002.
Theoretical linguistics and practical concerns: reflections on the divorce. University of Essex, England, December 2002.
Recasting the grammar of English: why the tradition needed revision. University of Sussex, England, December 2002.
Marginal members of lexical categories and their theoretical implications. University of Manchester and University College London, England, December 2002.
2003
Anomalous adjectives and prepositions in English. [Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented by Pullum.] Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, Atlanta, Georgia, January 2003.
Model theory and output-output correspondence. [Christopher Potts and Geoffrey K. Pullum. Presented by Potts.] Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, Atlanta, Georgia, January 2003.
A new look at what natural languages really are. Invited plenary address at the annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, May 2003.
Linguistic aspects of model-theoretic syntax. Presented at the Workshop on Model-theoretic Syntax, 1st North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (NASSLLI), Stanford, California, June 2003.
Contrasting applications of logic in natural language syntactic description. Invited presentation to the Philosophy of Linguistics section at the 12th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Oviedo, Spain, August 2003.
Formalizing an informal grammar: supplementary constituents in English. [Based on joint research with Chris Potts.] Formal Grammars conference, Vienna, Austria, August 2003.
Description, normativity, and standards: not in conflict. Presented in the session on Prescriptive Pedagogy and Descriptive Linguistics at the 2003 Convention of the Modern Language Association, San Diego, California, December 2003.
Varieties of nativism. Annual meeting, Society for Philosophy and Psychology, California Instute of Technology, Pasadena, California, June 2003. (Presentation jointly authored with Barbara C. Scholz.)
On the thesis that human languages are infinite. Presentation (of joint work with Barbara Scholz) in the Logical Methods in the Humanities series. Stanford University, February 2003.
Eskimo snow vocabulary: the rest of the story. Symbolic Systems Colloquium, Stanford University, April 2003.
Knowledge of language; ignorance of grammar. Annual Linguistics Symposium, California State University, Fullerton, April 25, 2003.
Orwell's other problem: on how little we know of grammar. Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, May 2003.
Problems of lexical categorization in traditional grammar and theoretical linguistics. Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara, May 2003.
Foundations of model-theoretic syntax: Linguistic aspects. One-week lecture course presented jointly with Barbara C. Scholz. 15th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI), Technical University of Vienna, Austria, August 2003.
The model-theoretic perspective on syntax: three significant consequences Institute for Research on Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, September 2003.
English grammar: the curious case of the missing twentieth century. Penn Speaker Series, Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, September 2003.
The model-theoretic perspective on natural language syntax: some unexpectedly radical consequences. (Joint presentation with Barbara C. Scholz.) Artificial Intelligence Research Group, Aiken Laboratory, Harvard University, October 2003.
Developing an empirical argument for linguistic nativism: Some constructive suggestions. Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, November 2003.
2004
Ideology, power, and linguistic theory. Presented in a special session at the 2004 Convention of the Modern Language Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, December 2004. Slightly revised 2006 version of the paper here (15 pages, PDF)
Arguments from stimulus poverty. (Joint presentation with Barbara C. Scholz.) Center for Human Development, University of California, San Diego, January 2004.
What happened to English grammar? Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, May 2004.
What grammars say. Invited lecture at the 3rd North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, UCLA, June 2004.
2005
Monkey syntax. Invited lecture at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, October 2005.
2006
Heedless of grammar. Invited lecture at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, February 2006.
Render unto syntax the things which are syntax. Invited lecture at University College London, September 2006.
Systematicity and the nature of languages. Presented at the conference on Mental Phenomena: Philosophy of Linguistics, Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, Croatia, September 2006. (Presentation jointly authored with Barbara C. Scholz.)
The making of The Cambridge Grammar. Invited lecture at the Université de Paris 7 (Paris, France), September 2006.
Lexical categorization: syntax and semantics. Invited lecture at the Université de Lille 3 (Lille, France), September 2006.
2007
Revolutionary new ideas appear infrequently. Invited presentation at ICLCE-2, the Second International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English, Toulouse, France, July 2007.
Aural pattern recognition experiments and the subregular hierarchy. Mathematics of Language 10 Conference, UCLA, July 2007. (Jointly authored with, and presented by, James Rogers.)
Creation myths of generative grammar and the mathematics underlying Syntactic Structures. Invited presentation at the Mathematics Of Language (MOL) conference, UCLA, Los Angeles, July 2007.
The evolution of model-theoretic frameworks in linguistics. Presented at Model-Theoretic Syntax at 10: a workshop organized as part of ESSLLI 2007 (the 19th European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information), Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, August 13-17.
Far from the Madding Gerund: Observations about language. Invited plenary lecture at the WritersUA Conference, Long Beach, California, March 2007.
Modeling Human and Non-Human Languages. Robert Efron Lecture at Pomona College (Pomona, California), April 2007.
Syntax for Computational Linguists. Course of five lectures at ESSLLI 2007, the 19th European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information, at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, August 13-17.
Interdisciplinary Work on Linguistic Nativism: Investigating Stimulus Poverty. (Joint presentation with Barbara C. Scholz.) Visiting lecture at the Department of Language and Linguistic Science, University of York, October 2007.
2008
The discipline where time stood still: Stagnation in the study of English grammar, and what we can do about it. Invited plenary address to the First International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC1), University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, May 10-11.
Expressive power of the syntactic theory implicit in The Cambridge Grammar. Annual meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Essex, 10-13 September 2008. (Paper jointly authored with James Rogers. Presented by Pullum.)
The Piranha Brothers, the unwritten grammatical law, and the phenomenon of nerdview. UA Conference—Europe 2008, Edinburgh, 17 September 2008.
Prescriptive linguistics in America: The land of the free and The Elements of Style. Workshop on Normative Grammar at ISLE 1, the first conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English, University of Freiburg, Germany, 8-11 October 2008.
Infinity, recursion, and the universal properties of human language. (Presenting joint work with Barbara C. Scholz.) Linguistics and English Language Seminar Series at the University of Manchester, April 2008.
2009
The strange phenomenon of English linguistic prescriptivism: ineradicable false beliefs about intimately known subject matter. Invited plenary presentation at the LANGNET Conference 2009, University of Helsinki, Finland, 29-31 January 2009.
The truth about English grammar: rarely pure and never simple. Invited plenary presentation at the 2009 LTTC International Conference on English Language Teaching and Testing, at the Language Training and Testing Center (LTTC), Taipei, Taiwan, 6-7 March 2009.
Computational linguistics and general linguistics: the triumph of hope over experience. European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics, Athens, Greece, 30 March 2009.
Corpus use, linguistic intuitions, and the epistemology of syntax. Invited plenary address to ICAME 30: the 30th Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English, University of Central Lancashire, May 27-30, 2009.
Language and thought: what should we tell the children? By Barbara C. Scholz and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 50th Anniversary Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, University of Edinburgh, September 2009.
What is this thing called systematicity? (Presenting joint work with Barbara C. Scholz.) Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, January 2009.
English grammar: The lost twentieth century. Hong Kong Baptist University, 2 March 2009 (2 p.m.).
Language studies: Bridging science and humanities. Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2 March 2009 (5 p.m.).
Grammaticality, frequency, and evidence in syntax. Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 3 March 2009.
Model-theoretic syntax and the implausibility of movement. North East Syntax Seminar, Newcastle University, 1 May 2009.
The part-of-speech classifications in English dictionaries: Critiques, criteria, and proposals. Presentation at the Annual General Meeting of the Philological Society, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 8 May 2009.
2010
Teaching grammar and teaching language. Invited keynote address at MANAVI M.A.P. 2010 International Symposium on Language Education, Osaka Cube Conference Center, Osaka, Japan, February 2010.
Arguing for Linguistic Nativism: A Case Study and Cautionary Tale. (Presentation of joint work with Barbara C. Scholz.) Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, April 2010.
(1) Arguing for linguistic nativism: Concepts, claims, and criteria
(with Barbara C. Scholz; presented jointly).
(2) The land of the free and The Elements of Style.
Brown University, Providence, RI, April 2010.
The land of the free and The Elements of Style. Boston College, Boston, MA, April 2010.
The land of the free and The Elements of Style: How False Claims about English Grammar Do Actual Harm. MIT, Cambridge, MA, April 2010.
Building an interdisciplinary case for linguistic nativism: The controversy over one-anaphora and phrase structure. (Presenting joint work with Barbara C. Scholz.) University of Oxford, October 2010.
2011
Linguistics for computability theorists: Three tutorial lectures. Computability in Europe 2011, University of Sofia, Bulgaria, June 2011.
Passive acceptance: The grammar and politics of voice First Linguistics Annual Lecture. Northumbria University, May 2011.
Don't be passive: The linguistics and politics of the maligned passive voice. Linguistics Master Class series. University of Salford, October 2011.
2012
Exophoric VP ellipsis. Philip Miller and Geoffrey K. Pullum (presented by Pullum). Linguistic Society of America annual meeting, Portland OR, January 2012.
Model-theoretic syntax and the unpersuasiveness of movement analyses. University of Cambridge, 18 June 2012.
Grammar bullies: What's wrong with them and how to deal with them. A. K. Smith Visiting Scholar series lecture at Trinity College, Hartford CT, 17 October 2012.
The grammar and meaning of anaphoric "one": multidisciplinary implications. Expressive Communication and Origins of Meaning Research Group (ECOM) at the Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 26 October 2012.
(1) Nervous cluelessness: How grammar teaching in America damages people's confidence and makes their writing worse; (2) The grammar and politics of the passive voice. University of South Carolina, Columbia SC, 9 November 2012.
Multidisciplinary implications of anaphoric "one". Yale University, New Haven CT, 12 November 2012.
2013
Structure, evidence, and the epistemology of syntax. Presented at the Workshop on Structure and Evidence in Syntax at Stanford University, California, April 2013.
The unfortunate divorce of English grammar from English literature. Invited plenary lecture at CELLS, the Conference on English Language and Literary Studies, University of Banja Luka, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 7 June 2013.
Discourse, usage, and the English passive constructions. Invited plenary lecture at IWoDA ’13, the 2013 International Workshop on Discourse Analysis, University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 21 June 2013.
Formalizing syntactic theories as a strategy for investigating cognition. Invited presentation at a conference on "The Cognitive Revolution 60 Years On", the British Academy, London, 26 September 2013.
Opacity: The last thing we need. Invited presentation at the Workshop on Opacity in Grammar, held in conjunction with the 28th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop at the University of Leipzig, Germany, 3 October 2013.
The linguistics and philosophy of expletives, epithets, slurs, and denigrations. Presented at the Workshop on Pejoratives, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 9 December 2013.
2014
'Standard English' and the ideology of prescriptivism. Invited presentation at the conference on Language and Ideology, Paris-Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria, 11 April 2014.
The usage game: Catering to perverts. Invited presentation at the workshop on Usage and Usage Guides, University of Cambridge, 27 June 2014.
The lexicography of insult and the philosophy of slurs. Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, 21 April 2014.
The stimulus poverty story: misconduct or incompetence?. Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, 24 April 2014.
The right way to describe syntactic structure. Vienna Linguistic Circle, 25 November 2014.
English grammar as a domain of scientific exploration. Department of English, University of Vienna, 26 November 2014.
2015
What to be realist about in linguistic science. Presentation at the Workshop on Foundations of Linguistics: Languages as Abstract Objects, Technische Universität Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig, Germany, June 25-28, 2015.
Editing English: what are the rules? Joint meeting of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) and the Society of Indexers (SI), University of York, England, September 6, 2015.
English literature and English grammar. 39th conference of AEDEAN (Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos), the Spanish Association of English Studies, University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain, November 11-13, 2015.
English: The Language that Ate the World. Keynote talk at a special 25th-anniversary jubilee conference of SENSE, the Society of English-Native-Speaking Editors in the Netherlands, Utrecht, Holland, November 14, 2015.
Heedless of Grammar: How English grammatical education collapsed in the 20th century, and what might be done about it. Department of English, University of Delaware, March 19, 2015.
Linguistic Science and English Grammar. Princeton University, March 23, 2015.
Passivophobia and Ignorance of Syntax. University of Kiel, Germany, April 24, 2015.
Linguistics and Politics: Interactions and Cautions. Politics and International Relations Society, University of Durham, October 15, 2015.
2016
Prescriptivism and the Discourse-Sensitive Syntax of English. 7th Brno Conference on Linguistics Studies in English, Brno, Czech Republic, September 12, 2016.
The 20th-century obsession with condemning passive clauses as evil. General Linguistics Seminar, University of Oxford, May 2, 2016.
Formalizing syntactic theories model-theoretically. IGRA group, University of Leipzig, June 22, 2016.
2017
Generative grammar and other very strange ideas. ULAB2017: The 2017 Conference of the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain, University of Cambridge, April 9, 2017.
Freedom and tyranny in English grammar: what the sophisticated copy editor should know. Conference of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders, Edinburgh, May 5, 2017.
Emil Post, computably enumerable sets, and the description of human languages. University of Lille 3, 5 April 2017.
Usage advisors and avoidance of passives: the unqualified in full pursuit of the unidentified. University of Kiel, 18 May 2017.
Words are things: lexicography and philosophy. Arché Slurring and Swearing Conference, Arché Research Centre, University of St Andrews, June 2, 2017.
If doctors knew medical science like writing critics know grammar, you'd be dead. English Grammar Day, The British Library, London, 3 July 2017.
The syntactic theory we all really want: some desiderata. 2017 Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference, Konstanz, Germany, July 26, 2017.
Grammar myths: self defence for copy editors in a world of bad grammar advice. 28th Annual Conference of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP), Wyboston Lakes conference centre, Bedfordshire, September 17, 2017.
2018
Rules, formalization, normativity, and prescriptivism. Workshop on Formalism in Linguistics, University of Edinburgh, 24 August 2018.
(1) The Linguistics and Philosophy of Language Acquisition;
(2) Formalizing syntactic theories via model theory.
University of Texas, February 2018.
Theorizing about the syntax of human language: A radical alternative to generative formalisms. Invited plenary lecture at Abralin 50 (Brazilian Association for Linguistics, 50th Anniversary Meeting), Maceió, Brazil, 7 May 2018.
Linguistics and why you should study it. British Academy Summer Showcase 2018.
Why linguistics matters. The 2018 Hermann Paul Lecture, University of Freiburg, Germany, 26 November 2018.
2019
One hundred years of ‘generating’ languages. Annual Meeting of the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences, New York, 4 January 2019.
Grammar, writing style, and linguistics. Linguistics Program, Columbia University, New York, 22 February 2019.
Formalization and prediction in theoretical syntax. Discourse in Philosophy colloquium, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, 14 March 2019.
Syntactic theory from a model-theoretic perspective. Amsterdam Colloquium for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam, 15 March 2019.
New light on the prehistory of generative grammar. Vossius Centre for the History of Humanities and Science, University of Amsterdam, 18 March 2019.
Remarks on what grammars are, or ought to be. HPSG Conference, Bucharest, Romania, July 2019.
The humble preposition and the sins of traditional grammar. Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, September 2019.
2020
Disentangling the effects of discourse conditions and mismatch on the acceptability of VP ellipsis. Philip Miller, Barbara Hemforth, and Geoffrey Pullum (presented by Miller). Linguistic Society of America, annual meeting, January 2020, New Orleans, Louisiana.
2021
Preventing atrophy of communication skills during a pandemic. Invited lecture delivered to full-length mirror in own bathroom at home, some time between February and November (cannot quite remember, seem to have lost track of time).
2022
Languages and sentences as objects of scientific study: syntactic theories and grammatical properties. NCCR/ISLE Colloquium, University of Zurich, Switzerland, 3 May 2022.
If doctors knew biomedical science like Strunk and White knew English grammar, you'd be dead. Department of English, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, 10 May 2022.
The scandal of the `how-to-write' industry. University of South Carolina, 7 November 2022.
African American English: linguistic and social aspects. University of South Carolina, 8 November 2022.
2023
Amazonian languages and cultures: the Everett controversy. George Mason University, Fairfax, 27 April 2023.
Rules of grammar. Presented as the conference on philosophy of linguistics (held in conjunction with Semantics And Linguistic Theory) at Yale University, 15 May 2023.
Pirahã syntax, ‘primitive’ languages, and the Everett controversy. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 12 October 2023.
The genius of Pieter Seuren and the subject matter of linguistics. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands, 13 October 2023.
Pirahã syntax and the Everett controversy. Presented to the 2024 Meeting of the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences, New York, 6 January 2024.
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