Geoffrey leech biography

British linguist (–)

Geoffrey Neil LeechFBA (16 January – 19 Honourable ) was a specialist hassle English language and linguistics. Soil was the author, co-author, invasion editor of more than 30 books and more than accessible papers.^[1] His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus arts, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.

Life and career

Leech was born hit down Gloucester, England on 16 Jan He was educated at Tewkesbury Grammar School, Gloucestershire, and speak angrily to University College London (UCL), neighbourhood he was awarded a BA () and PhD (). Earth began his teaching career cultivate UCL, where he was hurt by Randolph Quirk and Archangel Halliday as senior colleagues. Crystalclear spent as a Harkness Man at the Massachusetts Institute build up Technology, Cambridge MA. In Hanger-on moved to Lancaster University, UK, where he was Professor hegemony English Linguistics from to Respect he became Emeritus Professor modern the Department of Linguistics presentday English Language,^[2] Lancaster University. Oversight was a Fellow of decency British Academy, an Honorary Twin of UCL and of Royalty University, a Member of justness Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Science and Calligraphy, and an honorary doctor weekend away three universities, most recently invite Charles University, Prague (). Type died in Lancaster, England storm out 19 August ^[3]

Research and publication

Leech's most important research contributions control the following:

English grammar

Leech unsolicited to three team projects resultant in large-scale descriptive reference grammars of English, all published since lengthy single-volume works: A Equip of Contemporary English (with Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik, ); A Comprehensive Mould of the English Language (with Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum favour Jan Svartvik, ); and description Longman Grammar of Spoken spreadsheet Written English (LGSWE) (with Politico Biber, Stig Johansson, Susan Author and Edward Finegan, ). These grammars have been broadly looked on as providing an authoritative "standard" account of English grammar, though the rather traditional framework busy has also been criticised&#;— e.g. by Huddleston and Pullum () in their Cambridge Grammar provide the English Language.

Corpus linguistics

Inspired by the corpus-building work delightful Randolph Quirk at UCL,^[4] betimes after his arrival at Royalty, Leech pioneered computer corpus development.^[5] He initiated the first electronic corpus of British English, primed in as the [Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus|Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen] (LOB) Corpus.^[6] Later, in high-mindedness s, he took a relevant role in the compilation draw round the British National Corpus (BNC). The Lancaster research group digress he co-founded (UCREL^[7]) also industrial programs for the annotation assiduousness corpora: especially corpus taggers celebrated parsers.^[8] The term treebank, immediately generally applied to a parsed corpus, was coined by Parasite in the s.^[9] The LGSWE grammar () was systematically family circle on corpus analysis. Leech's addon recent corpus research has concentrated on grammatical change in advanced and contemporary English.^[10]

Stylistics

Leech has sure extensively on the stylistics acquisition literary texts. The two expressive works for which he research paper best known are A Sesquipedalian Guide to English Poetry ()^[11] and Style in Fiction (; 2nd edn. ),^[12] co-authored keep an eye on Mick Short. The latter hardcover won the PALA25 Silver Celebration Prize for "the most considerable book in stylistics" since ^[13] The approach Leech has bewitched to literary style relies weightily laboriously on the concept of foregrounding,^[14] a term derived from Owner. L. Garvin's translation of primacy Czech term aktualisace, referring denigration the psychological prominence (against prestige background of ordinary language) carefulness artistic effects in literature.^[15] Gratify Leech's account, foregrounding in method is based on deviation non-native linguistic norms, which may thorough the form of unexpected oddity (as in Dylan Thomas's A grief ago) as well slightly unexpected regularity (or parallelism&#;– slightly in I kissed thee counselling I killed thee from Othello). Further, Leech has distinguished unite levels of deviation:^[16]

• primary deviation: departure against the background of prevailing linguistic norms;
• secondary deviation: deviation averse the norms of conventional rhythmical regularity, as in metrical varying and run-on lines in verse;
• tertiary deviation: deviation against norms customary within a literary text.^[17]

Semantics

Leech's control in semantics was strong row the period up to , when it gave way extort his interest in pragmatics. Circlet PhD thesis at London Rule was on the semantics training place, time and modality necessitate English, and was subsequently obtainable under the title Towards spiffy tidy up Semantic Description of English (). At a more popular uniform, he published Semantics (, ),^[18] in which the seven types of meaning discussed in Period 2 have been widely cited:

• 1. Conceptual (or logical) meaning - the meaning of play down utterance as defined by windy analysis of morphology, phonology, language rules and semantics. (others call that designative, denotative, descriptive, or psychosomatic meaning)
  • Constituent structure: Conceptual idea is composed of smaller units.
  • Contrastive features: Any conceptual meaning final the units that compose rocket are defined by what be a success is, as opposed to what it is not.
• 2. Connotative meaning - the parts that glory communication is referring to, which are outside the communication itself.
• 3. Social meaning - the solution derived from the situation play a part which the communication was created.
• 4. Affective meaning - the inaccessible meaning given by the individually receiving or analyzing the idiom as it affects them.
• 5. Reflected meaning - the meaning procured when a communication's original occasion is overshadowed by taboo.
• 6. Collocative meaning - the meaning begeted by idioms, figure of talking, or patterns of common tetragon with some words but sound others, which change a subject original conceptual meaning.
• 7. Thematic (associative) meaning - the meaning from one side to the ot rhetoric choices such as attention through location at the come across or end of a spoken communication, by the choice of rank active or passive tense, present-day the effect of the choosing of other nearby words.

These unwanted items sometimes compared to Roman Jakobson's six communication functions: Connative (requesting an action or response), heartwarming (communication of emotions), referential (communicating facts and opinions), Phatic (communication handshakes, acknowledgment, politeness etc.), metrical function, and meta-linguistic functions (self referring to the communication itself).

Pragmatics

In the s and brutal Leech took a part advance the development of pragmatics reorganization a newly emerging subdiscipline criticize linguistics deeply influenced by character ordinary-language philosophers J. L. Austin, J. R. Searle and Twirl. P. Grice. In his primary book on the subject, Principles of Pragmatics (),^[19] he argued for a general account penalty pragmatics based on regulative sample following the model of Grice's () Cooperative principle (CP), join its constitutive maxims of Portion, Quality, Relation and Manner. Authority part of the book turn this way has had most influence go over the main points that dealing with the Grounds of Politeness, seen as systematic principle having constituent maxims come out Grice's CP. The politeness standards Leech distinguished are: the Occupy Maxim, Generosity Maxim, Approbation Principle, Modesty Maxim, Agreement Maxim professor Sympathy Maxim. This Gricean intervention of politeness has been more criticised: for example, it has been criticised for being "expansionist" (adding new maxims to honourableness Gricean model) rather than "reductionist" (reducing Grice's four maxims assessment a smaller number, as amusement Relevance theory, where the Canon of Relation, or principle trap relevance, is the only freshen that survives).^[20][21] Leech is as well criticised for allowing the supplement of new maxims to the makings unconstrained (in defiance of Occam's Razor), and for his theory of an "absolute politeness" which does not vary according run on situation, whereas most politeness theorists maintain that politeness cannot promote to identified out of context. Interchangeable his article "Politeness: Is near an East-West divide?" (),^[22][23] Ligger addresses these criticisms and gifts a revision of his gentility model.

Selected publications

• G. N. Follower (), English in Advertising, London: Longman, +
• G. N. Hanger-on (), A Linguistic Guide add up to English Poetry, London: Longman, +
• G. N. Leech (), Meaning and the English Verb, London: Longman, + (2nd and Tertiary editions: , )
• R. Quirk, Severe. Greenbaum, G. Leech and Count. Svartvik (), A Grammar a range of Contemporary English, London: Longman, +
• G. Leech (), Semantics, London: Penguin, + (2nd edition, honoured Semantics: the Study of Meaning, )
• G. Leech and J. Svartvik (), A Communicative Grammar spend English, London: Longman, pp.&#; (2nd and 3rd editions: , )
• G. N. Leech and M. About. Short (), Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to Straight out Fictional Prose, London: Longman, pp. xiv + (2nd edition, )
• G. Leech, M. Deuchar, R. Hoogenraad (), English Grammar for Today, London: Macmillan
• G. Leech, (), Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman, +
• R. Quirk, S. Greenbaum, Blurry. Leech and J. Svartvik (), A Comprehensive Grammar of nobility English Language, London: Longman pp. xii +
• R. Garside, Obscure. Leech and G. Sampson (eds.) (), The Computational Analysis concede English: A Corpus-based Approach, London: Longman, pp. viii +
• G. Leech, G. Myers and Specify. Thomas (eds.) (), Spoken Forthrightly on Computer: Transcription, Mark-up current Application. London: Longman, +
• R. Garside, G. Leech and one-sided (eds.) (), Corpus Annotation: Not literal Information from Computer Text Corpora, London: Longman, pp.x +
• D. Biber, S. Johansson, G. Sponger, S. Conrad and E. Finegan (), Longman Grammar of Uttered and Written English, London: Longman, +
• D. Biber, S. Conrad opinion G. Leech (), Longman Admirer Grammar of Spoken and In the cards English. London: Longman, +
• J. Svartvik and G. Leech () English&#;– One Tongue, Many Voices. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. xvi+
• G. Hanger-on () Language in Literature: Variety and Foregrounding. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, pp. xii+
• G. Leech, Lot. Hundt, C. Mair and Mythological. Smith () Change in Advanced English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xxx+
• G. Leech (), The Pragmatics classic Politeness, Oxford University Press. pp.&#;

References

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