Geoffrey Leech was Professor of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University

Lancaster University

Lancaster University, officially The University of Lancaster, is a leading research-intensive British university in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. The university was established by Royal Charter in 1964 and initially based in St Leonard's Gate until moving to a purpose-built 300 acre campus at...

 from 1974 to 2002. 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.

He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters

Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters is a learned society based in Oslo, Norway.-History:The University of Oslo was established in 1811. The idea of a learned society in Christiania surfaced for the first time in 1841. The city of Throndhjem had no university, but had a learned...

.

Leech's main academic interests are:

• English grammar
  English grammar
  English grammar is the body of rules that describe the structure of expressions in the English language. This includes the structure of words, phrases, clauses and sentences...
  
  
• Semantics
  Semantics
  Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
  
  
• Stylistics
  Stylistics (linguistics)
  Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective. As a discipline it links literary criticism and linguistics, but has no autonomous domain of its own...
  
  
• Pragmatics
  Pragmatics
  Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
  
  
• Corpus linguistics
  Corpus linguistics
  Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language. Originally done by hand, corpora are now largely...
  
  
• Corpus-based natural language processing by computer
  Computational linguistics
  Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
  
  

Selected publications

• A Glossary of English Grammar (2006)
• Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English (with D. Biber and S. Conrad) (2002)
• Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British National Corpus (with P. Rayson and A. Wilson) (2001)
• An A-Z of English Grammar and Usage (with B. Cruickshank and R. Ivanic) (2001)
• Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (with D. Biber, S. Johansson , S. Conrad and E. Finegan ) (1999)
• Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora (ed. with R. Garside and T. McEnery) (1997)
• Spoken English on Computer: Transcription, Mark-up and Application (ed. with G. Myers and J. Thomas) (1995)
• A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (with R. Quirk, S. Greenbaum and J. Svartvik) (1985)
• Principles of Pragmatics (1983)
• Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose (with M. Short) (1981; 2 nd edn. in preparation)
• A Communicative Grammar of English (with J. Svartvik) (1975, 2nd edn. 1994, 3rd edn. 2002)
• Meaning and the English Verb (1971, 2nd edn. 1987; 3 rd edn. 2004)
• Towards a Semantic Description of English (1969)
• A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969)
• English in Advertising: A Linguistic Study of Advertising in Great Britain (1966)

External links

• http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/geoff/geoff.htm