Rodney Huddleston is Honorary Research Consultant at the University of Queensland, Australia, where he served in the Linguistics Section of the English Department until 1998. He is an honorary life member of the Linguistic Society of America. He held lectureships at the University of Edinburgh, University College London, and the University of Reading before moving to the Department of English at the University of Queensland, where he won an ‘Excellence in Teaching’ award; he is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and in 1990 was awarded a Personal Chair. He has written numerous articles and books on English grammar, including The Sentence in Written English (1971), An Introduction to English Transformational Syntax (1976), Introduction to the Grammar of English (1984), English Grammar: An Outline (1988) and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002). He was the founding editor of the Australian Journal of Linguistics (1980–85). He will be receiving an honorary Doctor of Literature degree at University College London in September 2005.

Geoffrey K. Pullum is a linguist specializing in the study of English, and has published widely on the scientific study of language. During his studies he worked for a year on problems of applied linguistics and English language teaching at a further education center in a Punjabi-speaking immigrant area west of London, and retains a lifelong interest in applied linguistic concerns. Between 1974 and 1981 he taught at University College London, the University of Washington, and Stanford University. He was a Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1990–91. Since 1981 he has worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where his title is Professor of Linguistics. He served UCSC from 1987 to 1993 as Dean of Graduate Studies and Research. In 2005–2006 he will be a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

He has published a dozen books and nearly 200 technical articles within the field of linguistics. He was co-author of the book Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (1985) and co-editor of the four volumes of the Handbook of Amazonian Languages (1986–1998). Perhaps the best-known of his books is The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (1991), a highly entertaining (and often very funny) collection of satirical essays about the field of linguistics that originated as columns in the Topic...Comment series in the journal Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. He is principal co-author, together with Rodney Huddleston, of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002).