Geoffrey Leech

Geoffrey Neil Leech (1936-2014) was a British linguist who specialized in the study of the English language and authored or co-authored more than thirty books and 120 academic papers. He pioneered computer-based corpus linguistics at Lancaster University, initiating the first electronic corpus of British English, the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) Corpus, completed in 1978, and later led the development of the British National Corpus during the 1990s; his research group also created annotation programs for corpora, and Leech coined the term treebank for parsed corpora in the 1980s. His co-authored Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (1999) was systematically grounded in corpus analysis, and his later research examined grammatical change in contemporary English.