Professor Geoffrey Leech

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/pic_library/linguistics/geoff_leech.jpg

Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics

Degree: PhD, FilDr, DLitt, F.B.A., Member of the Academia Europaea

Associated research centres and groups: Pragmatics and Stylistics Research Group , Theoretical Linguistics - RITL, University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language (UCREL)

Research Interests

Posts

He was Professor of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University from 1974 to 1996. He then became Research Professor in English Linguistics. He has been Emeritus Professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, since 2002.

Publications

[See downloadable publications below] He has written, co-authored or co-edited over 25 books in the areas of English grammar, literary stylistics, semantics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics and pragmatics. They include:

• 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, 2nd edn. 1987; 3rd edn. 2004)
• A Communicative Grammar of English (with J. Svartvik) (1975, 2nd edn. 1994, 3rd edn. 2002)
• Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose (with M. Short) (1981; 2nd edn. 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 (ed. with G. Myers and J. Thomas) (1995)
• Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora (ed. 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 A-Z 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)

Full details of these and other publications, including articles and book chapters, can be found in the curriculum vitae which is downloadable in Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) format..

Research

A. Corpus Compilation and Annotation

1. Over the past thirty-six years a major research interest of Geoff Leech has been the use of computer corpora for the analysis and processing of the English Language. This began in 1971 when he started to build a 1,000,000-word corpus of British English matching as closely as possible the Brown Corpus of written American English, which had recently been completed. The project led eventually to the completion and 'publication' of the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) Corpus in 1978. After this, with Roger Garside, he worked on the word-class tagging of the LOB Corpus. [Research supported by Longman, the British Academy, and the SSRC.]

2. In 1991-1995 he was leader of the Lancaster team as part of the consortium which built the British National Corpus (1991-1995), a 100,000,000-word corpus of modern English written texts and spoken transcriptions: http://info.ox.ac.uk/bnc/. Lancaster was responsible for the word-class tagging of the whole BNC. More recently (1995-1999), he worked with Nick Smith on the improvement of the BNC's word-class tagging, for a second, world-wide release of the corpus (BNC-World) in 2000. [Research supported by the EPSRC] Website: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/projects.html#bnc

3. Since 1999 he has been working with Nick Smith (Lancaster, Salford), Christian Mair ( Freiburg ) and Marianne Hundt ( Heidelberg ) on the word-class tagging and grammatical analysis of the Freiburg-Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen ('FLOB') and Freiburg-Brown ('Frown') Corpora. These corpora of British and American written English match the LOB and Brown Corpora except that they contain extracts from publications of 1991 and 1992, instead of 1961. This allows us to track changes in the use of English grammar over a thirty-year period, as well as to make controlled contemporary comparisons between American and British English. One further extension of this project is the compilation of a corpus of British English over the period 1926-1931, reaching preliminary completion in 2007. This is provisionally entitled the 'Lancaster-1931 Corpus', or is more familiarly known as 'BLOB' ('before LOB'). It has enabled a further diachronic comparison of corpora to track changes in the period prior to that of the Brown and LOB Corpora. [Research supported by the AHRB, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust] Website: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/floblob.html

4. In 2001-2002 Geoff worked with Martin Weisser on the speech-act annotation of a corpus of approximately 1,000 goal-oriented service dialogues. The dialogues include the OASIS Corpus of dialogues made available for this research by British Telecom, and telephone call centre dialogues made available by The Trainline. [The research was supported by the EPSRC] Website: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/projects.html#spaac

B. Corpus-based Study of English Grammar

Linked with the research topics of corpus compilation and annotation, Geoff Leech has been pursuing a number of different avenues of research on the corpus-based study of English grammar.

1. He participated in a seven-year project sponsored by Longman and led by Doug Biber (Northern Arizona University), to produce a corpus-based grammar of English, focusing on American and British English and on the four registers of conversation, fiction writing, news writing, and academic writing. The book was eventually published in 1999 as Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) by Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan, Three strengths of the book are (a) its extensive investigation of grammatical frequency, (b) its detailed study of differences in the use of grammar in different varieties of language, and (c) its thorough exemplification of present-day English grammar through the citation of thousands of corpus examples. After the publication of this 'big' grammar, three members of the team (Biber, Conrad and Leech) wrote a shorter students' version, Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English, together with an accompanying Workbook.

2. Since his most innovative involvement in LGSWE was working on Chapter 14 'The grammar of conversation', he became particularly interested in how corpora throw light on the nature of grammar in the spoken language. He published two articles and one book chapter on this topic in 2000-2001, perhaps the most important being 'Grammars of spoken English: New implications of corpus-oriented research', Language Learning, 50: 3, 675-724.

3. Out of the improved word-class tagging of the BNC (see A.2 above) came the opportunity to produce a book, with Paul Rayson and Andrew Wilson, on Word Frequency in Written and Spoken English (2001). Crucial to this book was the grammatical tagging of the BNC so that frequencies - allowing for a small margin of error - could be attached to lexemes and their grammatical variants. The BNC re-tagging also allowed frequencies, including frequencies of grammatical word classes, to be compared across different varieties of language in the corpus (notably spoken v. written English). This was the most advanced word frequency book of the English language yet published.

4. In collaboration with Christian Mair, Marianne Hundt and Nick Smith, he has worked on the comparable corpora mentioned in A.4 above, as well as other data, to investigate recent changes in English grammar. His publications in this area include 'Modality on the move: the English modal auxiliaries 1961-1992', in Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug and Frank Palmer (eds.) Modality in Contemporary English , Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003; also 'Recent grammatical change in English: data, description, theory', in K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg (eds), Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Papers from the 23rd International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora ( ICAME 23) Göteborg 22-26 May 2002 , Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 61-81; (with N. Smith)'Recent grammatical change in written English 1961-1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English.' In Renouf, A. and Kehoe, A. (ed.), The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, pp. 186-204; also a chapter on 'Current changes in English syntax', with Christian Mair, published in The Handbook of English Linguistics (CUP, 2006), ed. Bas Aarts and April McMahon. A corpus-based book on this subject, co-authored with M. Hundt, Ch. Mair and N. Smith, Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study, is in preparation for CUP.

C. Other Research Interests

1. Pragmatics has recently become one of his active research interests once again, after a gap of twenty years. This is partly through work on the compilation of a speech-act annotated corpus (A.4 above) and partly through a revival of interest in the pragmatics of polite communication: see 'Politeness: Is there an East-West divide?', Journal of Foreign Languages (Shanghai) 6 (2005) 3-31 . A revised version of this article, with the same title, has recently appeared in Journal of Politeness Research.

2. Stylistics is another area of interest which has tended to lapse in recent years: but in 2005Geoff and his colleague Mick Short won the PALA 25 Silver Jubilee Prize for the 'most influential book in stylistics' since the founding of PALA (the Poetics and Linguistics Association) in 1980. The prize was awarded for their book Style in Fiction (Longman 1981). As a consequence of this, Leech and Short hosted 'SIFS' (a Style in Fiction symposium) at Lancaster in March 2006. The proceedings of the symposium have been published in the journal Style (2007) in a special number (Vol. 41.2) devoted to new developments in the stylistics of fiction, edited by Short and Leech. The authors have recently (2007) produced a second edition of Style in Fiction for Longman. Geoff has recently published, with Pearson/Longman, a book entitled Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding, containing a number of articles on stylistics published in the period 1965-1992, as well as four new chapters both theoretical and applied.

Recent Talks

Talk presented at Lancaster on Wednesday 6 December 2006 at 4pm, at Lancaster University. Download article.

Plenary lecture presented at the TalC8 (Teaching and Language Corpora) in Lisbon on 6 July 2008.The title was 'Frequency is important - and challenging: a present-day corpus perspective'.

New Publications

Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short (2007) Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. (2nd edn.) Harlow, Essex: Pearson/Longman. pp.xvi+404.

Geoffrey Leech (2007) 'Style in Fiction revisited: The beginning of Great Expectations.' Style, 41.2, 117-132.

Geoffrey Leech (2007) 'The unique history of place-names in North West England.' In Text, Language and Interpretation: Essays in Honour of Keiko Ikegami. Tokyo: Eihoosha. pp. 42-61.

Geoffrey Leech (2008) Language in Literature: Style and Foregrounding. Harlow, Essex: Pearson/Longman. pp.xii+222.

Interview:

Paloma Nunez Pertejo (2007) 'An interview with Geoffrey Leech: Santiago de Compostela, June 9, 2006.' Atlantis, 29.1 (June 2007). 143-156.

Career details

Assistant Lecturer, University College London - 1962-4

Harkness Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 1964-5

Lecturer, University College London - 1965-9

Reader in English Language, Lancaster University - 1969-74

Professor of Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University - 1974-1996

Research Professor in English Linguistics, Lancaster University - 1996-2001

Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics, Lancaster University - from 2002

Downloadable publications

Leech, G. (2001), 'The role of frequency in ELT: New corpus evidence brings a re-appraisal', in Hu Wenzhong (ed.) ELT in China 2001: Papers presented at the 3rd International Symposium on ELT in China', Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, pp. 1-23.

Leech, G. (2004), 'Recent grammatical change in English: data, description, theory', in K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg (eds.), Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Papers from the 23rd International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 23) Göteborg 22-26 May 2002, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 61-81.

Leech, G. (2005) 'Politeness: Is there an East-West divide?', Journal of Foreign Languages, Shanghai, 6, 3-31. A revised version has been published in: Journal of Politeness Research, 3.2 (2006), 167-206.

Leech, G. (2007) 'The unique heritage of place-names in North West England.' In Y. Nakao (ed.) Text, Language and Interpretation: Essays in Honour of Keiko Ikegami, pp. 43-62.

Leech, G. (2007) 'New resources, or just better old ones? The Holy Grail of representativeness,' in M. Hundt, N. Nesselhauf and C. Biewer (eds.) Corpus Linguistics and the Web, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 133-49.

Leech, G. (2007) 'Style in fiction revisited: the beginning of Great Expectations.' Style, 41.2, 117-132.

Leech, G. and Smith, N. (2005), 'Extending the possibilities of corpus-based research on English in the twentieth century: a prequel to LOB and FLOB', ICAME Journal, 29: 83-98.

Leech, G. and Smith, N. (2006) 'Recent grammatical change in written English 1961-1992: some preliminary findings of a comparison of American with British English.' In Renouf, A. and Kehoe, A. (ed.), The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 186-204.

Leech, G. and Weisser, M. (2003) 'Generic speech act annotation for task-oriented dialogues', in D. Archer, P. Rayson, A. Wilson and T. McEnery (eds.) Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference, University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language, Technical Papers 16.1, pp. 441-6.

Mair, C., Hundt, M., Leech, G., and Smith, N. (2003), 'Short term diachronic shifts in part-of-speech frequencies: a comparison of the tagged LOB and F-LOB corpora', International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 7: 2, 245-264.

Mair, C. and Leech, G. (2006) 'Current change in English syntax', Chapter 14 in B. Aarts and A. MacMahon (eds.) TheHandbook of English Linguistics, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 318-342.

Other Interests and Hobbies

Playing the piano (especially in chamber music groups) and the church organ. Fell-walking (the fells have to be small ones these days!).