Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA (16 January 1936 – 19 August 2014) was a specialist in English language and linguistics.
[1] His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.
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.
Inspired by the corpus-building work of Randolph Quirk at UCL,[4] soon after his arrival at Lancaster, Leech pioneered computer corpus development.
The Lancaster research group that he co-founded (UCREL[7]) also developed programs for the annotation of corpora: especially corpus taggers and parsers.
In the 1970s and 1980s Leech took a part in the development of pragmatics as a newly emerging subdiscipline of linguistics deeply influenced by the ordinary-language philosophers J. L. Austin, J. R. Searle and H. P. Grice.