Obituary: Geoffrey N. Leech (16 January 1936 to 19 August 2014)

Abstract

Geoffrey Leech has been one of the founder figures of computer-aided corpus linguistics – a field in which his name will remain associated with key resources and important breakthroughs. His wide-ranging scholarly interests, his willingness to debate his ideas with scholars of different methodological persuasions to his own, his generous mentorship of younger scholars and his ability to present linguistic issues to an interested lay public will ensure him a lasting reputation beyond corpus linguistics. Geoff Leech was born in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, where he attended the small but reputable local grammar school. After his national service in the Royal Air Force, spent (mostly on the ground) in West Germany, he started his bachelor studies at University College London in 1956. It was obviously a case of the right person in the right place at the right time: a highly motivated student with a keen interest in the study of language confronting and benefitting from a most congenial and stimulating working environment and intellectual climate. It was the time in British academia when various language-related strands of research began to coalesce into the fully fledged academic discipline of linguistics as we know it today. As he himself put it many years later: ‘I regard it as the most fortunate accident of my career that when I went to study at University College I chanced upon a magic circle of leading scholars in the study of language’ (Leech, 2002: 155). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, inspiration for Geoff Leech came from the UCL phoneticians (Daniel Jones, A.C. Gimson and J.D. O’Connor), from John Rupert Firth (Britain’s first designated professor of linguistics), from M.A.K. Halliday (Director of UCL’s short-lived Communication Research Centre or CRC, where a research studentship sponsored by a commercial television broadcaster laid the foundations for Geoff Leech’s master’s thesis on the topic of English in advertising (see Leech, 1966), and above all, of course, from Randolph Quirk, who introduced Geoff Leech to the then yet-to-be-digitised Survey of English Usage (SEU) corpus