Julian Charles Boyd (December 25, 1931 – April 5, 2005) was an American linguist, reputed for his expertise on modality in English, as well as for his pedagogical excellence at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent most of his academic career.
Boyd joined the Berkeley faculty in the 1960s, a period of intense interest in linguistics during which many scholars hoped the field would provide the humanities with a "scientific" basis.
The department attracted students and faculty from continental Europe, Britain, and the United States, including Noam Chomsky, the visiting Beckman Professor in 1966, whose transformational linguistics Boyd found deeply appealing in its philosophical implications.
He preferred to be called a "philosophical grammarian" rather than a linguist and aligned himself with the British analytical tradition of speech act theory, as inspired by J. L. Austin and John Searle.
In 1993, Boyd won the university's Distinguished Teaching Award, based on superb evaluations from students, for his managing to demand high intellectual standards while maintaining a friendly rapport with his pupils.