Gregory Ward received his BA in Comparative Literature and Linguistics (with honors) from the University of California-Berkeley in 1978, and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1986 (and was Chair from 1999-2004). He has also taught at the 1993, 1997, 2003, and 2007 Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Summer Linguistic Institutes.

His primary research area is discourse, with specific interests in pragmatic theory, information structure, intonational meaning, and reference/anaphora. He has published over 60 papers and given over 120 talks and presentations. Recent publications have investigated deferred reference, event anaphora (with Andrew Kehler), and functional compositionality (with Betty J. Birner and Jeffrey Kaplan). With Birner, he co-authored Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English (Benjamins, 1998). With Birner and Rodney Huddleston, he is co-author of 'Information Packaging', Chapter 16 of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge 2002). With Laurence Horn, he is co-editor of Blackwell's The Handbook of Pragmatics (Blackwell 2004), and with Birner, he is co-editor of Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning: Neo-Gricean Studies in Pragmatics and Semantics in Honor of Laurence R. Horn (Benjamins 2006).

From 1986 to 1998, Ward was a consultant at AT&T Labs – Research, working on intonational meaning. He was co-PI on an NIH grant (1991-1996) to study sentence processing and is currently co-PI (with Julia Hirschberg) on an NSF grant to study dialogue prosody for voice response systems. In 2004-05, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and from 2004-2007 he served as Secretary-Treasurer of the Linguistic Society of America.

At Northwestern, Ward teaches courses on pragmatic theory (LING 372 Pragmatics), reference (LING 371 Reference), information structure (LING 473 Seminar in Pragmatics), and gender studies (LING 327 Language & Sexuality). He is an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Philosophy. Ward also serves as a freelance linguistic consultant on legal issues relating to sentence and utterance interpretation.