Rodney Huddleston graduated from the University of Cambridge in Modern & Medieval Languages in 1960, and earned his PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh in 1963. He held lectureships at the University of Edinburgh, University College London and the University of Reading, before moving in 1969 to the Department of English at the University of Queensland, where he worked until formally retiring in 1998. He was the winner of one of three ‘Excellence in Teaching' awards at the University of Queensland in 1988, and in 1990 was awarded a Personal Chair. He has written numerous articles and books on English grammar, including An Introduction to English Transformational Syntax (1976) and Introduction to the Grammar of English (1984), and was the founding editor of The Australian Journal of Linguistics (1980—1985).

Geoffrey K. Pullum earned his B.A. in Language at the University of York in 1972 and his Ph.D. in General Linguistics at the University of London four years later. After teaching at University College London for seven years he moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he served as Dean of Graduate Studies and Research for six years and is currently Professor of Linguistics. He was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in 1990–91. His numerous publications cover not only syntactic theory and English grammar but also on a large number of other topics in linguistics. His books include Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (1985, with Gazdar, Klein, and Sag) and a collection of satirical essays on linguistics, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (1991).