Geoffrey Leech
| Geoffrey Leech | |
|---|---|
| Native name | Geoffrey Neil Leech |
| Born | 16 January 1936 Gloucester, Gloucestershire, England |
| Died |
19 August 2014 (aged 78) Lancaster, Lancashire, England |
Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA (16 January 1936 – 19 August 2014) was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author or editor of over 30 books and over 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics and semantics.
Leech was born in Gloucester, England on 16 January 1936. He was educated at Tewkesbury Grammar School, Gloucestershire, and at University College London (UCL), where he was awarded a BA (1959) and PhD (1968). He began his teaching career at UCL, where he was influenced by Randolph Quirk and Michael Halliday as senior colleagues. He spent 1964-5 as a Harkness Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA. In 1969 Leech moved to Lancaster University, UK, where he was Professor of English Linguistics from 1974 to 2001. In 2002 he became Emeritus Professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of UCL and of Lancaster University, a Member of the Academia Europaea and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and an honorary doctor of three universities, most recently of Charles University, Prague (2012). He died in Lancaster, England on 19 August 2014.
Leech's most important research contributions are the following:
Leech contributed to three team projects resulting in large-scale descriptive reference grammars of English, all published as lengthy single-volume works: A Grammar of Contemporary English (with Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik, 1972); A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (with Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik, 1985); and the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) (with Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan, 1999). These grammars have been broadly regarded as providing an authoritative "standard" account of English grammar, although the rather traditional framework employed has also been criticised — e.g. by Huddleston and Pullum (2002) in their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
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