Huddleston, Rodney

Abstract Rodney Desmond Huddleston was born near Manchester on April 4, 1937. He attended Manchester Grammar School and, after two years of compulsory military service, studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, graduating in 1960 with first class honors in modern and medieval languages. In 1963 he completed a PhD at Edinburgh University under the supervision of Michael Halliday entitled “A descriptive and comparative analysis of texts in French and English: an application of grammatical theory,” and was appointed to a lectureship in linguistics in the same year. In 1965 he moved to University College London, where he led a research project on the linguistic properties of scientific English. The findings were reported in his first monograph, which outlined many of the tenets that Huddleston was to subsequently develop in his major publications on descriptive English grammar. In 1967 Huddleston took up a lectureship at the University of Reading, where he worked with Frank Palmer, Peter Matthews, and David Crystal, before moving to a lectureship at University College London in 1968. In 1969 he moved to the University of Queensland (where he has stayed for the rest of his career).