Rodney D. Huddleston (born 4 April 1937) is a British linguist and grammarian specializing in the study and description of English.
Upon leaving school, he spent two years in the military completing National Service before enrolling at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, with a scholarship, where he graduated in 1960 with a First Class Honours degree in Modern and Medieval Languages.
[1][2] After graduating from Cambridge, Huddleston earned his PhD in Applied Linguistics[3] from the University of Edinburgh in 1963 under the supervision of Michael Halliday.
A number of quite basic categories and concepts do not seem to have been thought through with sufficient care; this results in a remarkable amount of unclarity and inconsistency in the analysis, and in the organization of the grammar.
In some ways it is the social side of these events that lingers in the memory long after the details of linguistic discussion are forgotten.
We remember particularly dawn jogs to Alexandra Beach from Rodney’s house at Sunshine Beach, pool volleyball and table tennis games fought with great ferocity, and walks through Noosa National Park with spectacular sunsets over Noosa Bay.
In 2004, Peter Culicover wrote:The Cambridge grammar of the English language (CGEL) is a monumentally impressive piece of work.
X-bar theory is a specific type of phrase-structure grammar that posits a uniform structure for all phrasal categories, with each phrase containing a "head" and optional specifier and/or complement.