Geoffrey Leech is Emeritus Professor of EnglishLinguistics at Lancaster University， where he hasbeen a faculty member for over 40 years. He haspublished many books and articles in the fields ofEnglish grammar， stylistics， pragmatics， semanticsand corpus linguistics. His research career dates from the 1960s， when he produced three books （English in Advertising， A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry，and Towards a Semantic Description of English）， and extends to the present time： his recent works include Language in Literature （2008） and （with Marianne Hundt， Christian Mair and Nicholas Smith） Change in Contemporary English： A Grammatical Study （2009）. Among his best-known books are Meaning and the English Verb （1971; 3rd ed. 2004）， （with Jan Svartvik） A Communicative Grammar of English （1975; 3rd ed. 2002）， Principles of Pragmatics （1983）， and （with Randolph Quirk， Sidney.Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik） A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language （1985）. In the 1970s， he was a pioneer in the development of computer corpus linguistics， creating with Stig Johansson and others the first available corpus of British English， the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus.Later he led the Lancaster team as part of the BNC consortium that created the British National Corpus （1991-5）. He studied at MIT for a year in 1964-5，was awarded the distinction of Honorary Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1994， and has also held visiting positions in Australia， France，Japan， New Zealand and the USA. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1987.
