Geoffrey Leech is Emeritus Professor ofEnglishLinguistics at Lancaster University, where he hasbeen afaculty member for over 40 years. He haspublished many books andarticles in the fields ofEnglish grammar, stylistics, pragmatics,semanticsand corpus linguistics. His research career dates from the1960s, when he produced three books (English in Advertising, ALinguistic Guide to English Poetry,and Towards a SemanticDescription of English), and extends to the present time: hisrecent works include Language in Literature (2008) and (withMarianne Hundt, Christian Mair and Nicholas Smith) Change inContemporary English: A Grammatical Study (2009). Among hisbest-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 (withRandolph Quirk, Sidney.Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik) A ComprehensiveGrammar of the English Language (1985). In the 1970s, he was apioneer in the development of computer corpus linguistics, creatingwith Stig Johansson and others the first available corpus ofBritish English, the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus.Later he led theLancaster team as part of the BNC consortium that created theBritish National Corpus (1991-5). He studied at MIT for a year in1964-5,was awarded the distinction of Honorary Professor at BeijingForeign Studies University in 1994, and has also held visitingpositions in Australia, France,Japan, New Zealand and the USA. Hewas elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1987.