Geoffrey Leech

Geoffrey Leech (born January 16, 1936 in Gloucester , Gloucestershire, England, † August 19, 2014 in Lancaster , Lancashire , England) was a British philologist and linguist. From 1974 to 2002 he was Professor of Linguistics and Modern English at Lancaster University . Then he devoted himself to researching the English language. Since 2002 he has been Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Lancaster .

life and work

Main interest

Leech mainly dealt with semantics, pragmatics, stylistics, corpus analysis and the analysis of the English language through the use of computers. After a break of 20 years, he was actively researching in the field of pragmatics again. According to him, there is a principle of courtesy with dialogue-oriented maxims, similar to those that Paul Grice formulated. Since 2005, when he and his colleague Mick Short won the PALA 25 (PALA = Poetic and Linguistic Association) prize for their book Style and Fiction (Longman, 1981), he has been more concerned with stylistics. A few years ago, in 2007, the two authors brought out a second edition of Style and Fiction .

Career and academic degrees

Leech studied from 1955 to 1968 at UCL (University College London), where he was a lecturer from 1962 to 1965 and lecturer in English from 1965 to 1969 at the same. At UCL he completed the following degrees: BA (1959), MA (1963), Ph.D. (1968). In addition, Leech received the following academic degrees: Fil.Dr. (Honorary Doctorate), Lund University (1987), Hon.D.Litt. , Wolverhampton University (2002), D.Litt. , University of Lancaster (2002). In 1969, Leech moved to Lancaster University, where he was employed as a lecturer until 1974 and as professor for linguistics and the modern English language from 1974 to 1996. From 1996 onwards, still on behalf of the University of Lancaster , he worked as a Research Professor in English Linguistics with the study of the English language. Since 2002 Leech was professor emeritus for English linguistics there.

Memberships

Geoffrey Leech was also a member of numerous organizations:

of the British Academy (since 1987)
of the Academia Europaea (since 1989)
of the UCL (since 1989)
the Norske Videnskaps-Akademi (since 1993)
Hon. Professor of Beijing Foreign Language University (since 1994)

Publications

Geoffrey Leech wrote, was co-author or co-editor of 29 books and well over 100 articles, including a. he contributed to A Grammar of Contemporary English by Quirk and Greenbaum. Here are some of the works listed:

English in Advertising: A Linguistic Study of Advertising in Great Britain (1966)
A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969)
Meaning and the English Verb (1971, second edition 1987; third edition 2004)
Semantics (1974; 2nd edition 1981)
A Communicative Grammar of English (with J. Svartvik) (1975, second edition 1994, third edition 2002)
Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose (with M. Short) (1981; second edition 2007)
Principles of Pragmatics (1983)
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (with R. Quirk, S. Greenbaum and J. Svartvik) (1985)
Spoken English on Computer: Transcription, Mark-up and Application (with G. Myers and J. Thomas) (1995)
Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora (with R. Garside and T. McEnery) (1997)
Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (with D. Biber, S. Johansson, S. Conrad and E. Finegan) (1999)
An AZ of English Grammar and Usage (with B. Cruickshank and R. Ivanic) (2001)
Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British National Corpus (with P. Rayson and A. Wilson) (2001)
Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English (with D. Biber and S. Conrad) (2002)
A Glossary of English Grammar (2006)
English - One Tongue, Many Voices (with J. Svartvik) (2006)
Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding (2008)
Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study (with M. Hundt, Ch. Mair and N. Smith) (2009)

literature

Greg Myers: Geoffrey Neil Leech, 1936-2014 . In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy . tape XVI , 2017, p. 147-168 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Leech, Geoffrey
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British philologist and linguist
DATE OF BIRTH	January 16, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH	Gloucester , Gloucestershire, England
DATE OF DEATH	19th August 2014
Place of death	Lancaster , Lancashire , England