astronomy

Geoffrey Leech

Geoffrey Leech is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Geoffrey Leech rather than just read about it. In short: Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA (16 January 1936 – 19 August 2014) was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books and more than 120 published papers.

Key takeaways

Geoffrey Leech belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Geoffrey Leech to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Geoffrey Leech from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Geoffrey Neil Leech FBA (16 January 1936 – 19 August 2014) was a specialist in English language and linguistics. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books and more than 120 published papers. His main academic interests were English grammar, corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, and semantics.

Life and career Leech was born in Gloucester, England on 16 January 1936. 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. He spent 1964-5 as a Harkness Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA. In 1969 Leech moved to Lancaster University, UK, where he was Professor of English Linguistics from 1974 to 2001. In 2002 he became Emeritus Professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of UCL and of Lancaster University, a Member of the Academia Europaea and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and an honorary doctor of three universities, most recently of Charles University, Prague (2012). He died in Lancaster, England on 19 August 2014.

Research and publication Leech's most important research contributions are the following:

English grammar Leech contributed to three team projects resulting in large-scale descriptive reference grammars of English, all published as lengthy single-volume works: A Grammar of Contemporary English (with Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik, 1972); A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (with Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum and Jan Svartvik, 1985); and the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) (with Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan, 1999). These grammars have been broadly regarded as providing an authoritative "standard" account of English grammar, although the rather traditional framework employed has also been criticised — e.g. by Huddleston and Pullum (2002) in their Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

Corpus linguistics Inspired by the corpus-building work of Randolph Quirk at UCL, soon after his arrival at Lancaster, Leech pioneered computer corpus development. He initiated the first electronic corpus of British English, completed in 1978 as the [Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus|Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen] (LOB) Corpus. Later, in the 1990s, he took a leading role in the compilation of the British National Corpus (BNC). The Lancaster research group that he co-founded (UCREL) also developed programs for the annotation of corpora: especially corpus taggers and parsers. The term treebank, now generally applied to a parsed corpus, was coined by Leech in the 1980s. The LGSWE grammar (1999) was systematically based on corpus analysis. Leech's more recent corpus research has centred on grammatical change in recent and contemporary English.

Stylistics Leech has written extensively on the stylistics of literary texts. The two stylistic works for which he is best known are A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (1969) and Style in Fiction (1981; 2nd edn. 2007), co-authored with Mick Short. The latter book won the PALA25 Silver Jubilee Prize for "the most influential book in stylistics" since 1980. The approach Leech has taken to literary style relies heavily on the concept of foregrounding, a term derived from P. L. Garvin's translation of the Czech term aktualisace, referring to the psychological prominence (against the background of ordinary language) of artistic effects in literature. In Leech's account, foregrounding in poetry is based on deviation from linguistic norms, which may take the form of unexpected irregularity (as in Dylan Thomas's A grief ago) as well as unexpected regularity (or parallelism – as in I kissed thee ere I killed thee from Othello). Further, Leech has distinguished three levels of deviation:

primary deviation: deviation against the background of general linguistic norms; secondary deviation: deviation against the norms of conventional poetic regularity, as in metrical variation and run-on lines in verse; tertiary deviation: deviation against norms established within a literary text.

Semantics Leech's interest in semantics was strong in the period up to 1980, when it gave way to his interest in pragmatics. His PhD thesis at London University was on the semantics of place, time and modality in English, and was subsequently published under the title Towards a Semantic Description of English (1969). At a more popular level, he published Semantics (1974, 1981), in which the seven types of meaning discussed in Chapter 2 have been widely cited:

1. Conceptual (or logical) meaning - the meaning of an utterance as defined by linguistic analysis of morphology, phonology, syntax and semantics. (others call this designative, denotative, descriptive, or cognitive meaning) Constituent structure: Conceptual meaning is composed of smaller units. Contrastive features: Any conceptual meaning and the units that compose it are defined by what something is, as opposed to what it is not. 2. Connotative meaning - the parts that the communication is referring to, which are outside the communication itself. 3. Social meaning - the meaning derived from the situation in which the communication was created. 4. Affective meaning - the personal meaning given by the person receiving or analyzing the communication as it affects them. 5. Reflected meaning - the meaning obtained when a communication's original meaning is overshadowed by taboo. 6. Collocative meaning - the meaning created by idioms, figure of speech, or patterns of common usage with some words but not others, which change a words original conceptual meaning. 7. Thematic (associative) meaning - the meaning by rhetoric choices such as emphasis through location at the beginning or end of a communication, by the choice of the active or passive tense, and the effect of the choice of other nearby words. These are sometimes compared to Roman Jakobson's six communication functions: Connative (requesting an action or response), emotive (communication of emotions), referential (communicating facts and opinions), Phatic (communication handshakes, acknowledgment, politeness etc.), poetic function, and meta-linguistic functions (self referring to the communication itself).

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Geoffrey Leech

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Geoffrey Leech claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Geoffrey Leech before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Geoffrey Leech ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Geoffrey Leech

In research: Geoffrey Leech appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Geoffrey Leech in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Geoffrey Leech is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1936 births, 2014 deaths, Academics of Lancaster University, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Geoffrey Leech outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Geoffrey Leech in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Geoffrey Leech means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Geoffrey Leech out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Geoffrey Leech in simple terms?

Why does Geoffrey Leech matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Geoffrey Leech?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Geoffrey Leech.