Geoffrey N. Leech

Mick Short

Describes the ways in which the techniques of linguistic analysis and literary criticism can be combined, and illuminated, through the linguistic study of literary style, and draws on the prose fiction of the last 150 years to demonstrate the approach.

A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose

Style in Fiction

This is a study of the ways in which techniques of linguistic analysis and literary criticism can be combined, and illuminated, throughout the linguistic study of literary style.

This book is about building computer programs that parse (analyze, or diagram) sentences of a real-world English. The English we are concerned with might be a corpus of everyday, naturally-occurring prose, such as the entire text of this morning's newspaper.Most programs that now exist for this purpose are not very successful at finding the correct analysis for everyday sentences. In contrast, the programs described here make use of a more successful statistically-driven approach.Our book is, first, a record of a five-year research collaboration between IBM and Lancaster University. Large numbers of real-world sentences were fed into the memory of a program for grammatical analysis (including a detailed grammar of English) and processed by statistical methods. The idea is to single out the correct parse, among all those offered by the grammar, on the basis of probabilities. Second, this is a how-to book, showing how to build and implement a statistically-driven broad-coverage grammar of English. We even supply our own grammar, with the necessary statistical algorithms, and with the knowledge needed to prepare a very large set (or corpus) of sentences so that it can be used to guide the statistical processing of the grammar's rules.

The IBM/Lancaster Approach

Statistically-driven Computer Grammars of English

This readable book presents a new general theoretical understanding of politeness. It offers an account of a wide range of politeness phenomena in English, illustrated by hundreds of examples of actual language use taken largely from authentic British and American sources. Building on his earlier pioneering work on politeness, Geoffrey Leech takes a pragmatic approach that is based on the controversial notion that politeness is communicative altruism. Leech's 1983 book, Principles of Pragmatics, introduced the now widely-accepted distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of politeness; this book returns to the pragmalinguistic side, somewhat neglected in recent work. Drawing on neo-Gricean thinking, Leech rejects the prevalent view that it is impossible to apply the terms 'polite' or 'impolite' to linguistic phenomena. Leech covers all major speech acts that are either positively or negatively associated with politeness, such as requests, apologies, compliments, offers, criticisms, good wishes, condolences, congratulations, agreement, and disagreement. Additional chapters deal with impoliteness and the related phenomena of irony ("mock politeness") and banter ("mock impoliteness"), and with the role of politeness in the learning of English as a second language. A final chapter takes a fascinating look at more than a thousand years of history of politeness in the English language.

The Pragmatics of Politeness

Professor Geoffrey N Leech

Geoffrey Leech stresses the contribution of semantics to the understanding of practical problems of communication and concept-manipulation in modern society.

Semantics

Every language has its peculiar problems of meaning for the foreign learner. In the English language, some of the biggest yet most fascinating problems are concentrated in the area of the finite verb phrase: in particular, tense, aspect, mood and modality. Meaning and the English Verb describes these fields in detail for teachers and advanced students of English as a foreign or second language. This new third edition uses up-to-date examples to show differences and similarities between American and British english, reflecting a great deal of recent research in this area. It also takes account of the subtle changes which are taking place in the language today. In print for over 30 years, Meaning and the English Verb has established itself as a recognised authority on the meaning and use of verb constructions in English. This updated third edition will ensure that it remains an invaluable text for teachers and students of English worldwide.

Meaning and the English Verb

Roz Ivanič

Benita Cruickshank

In a completely thoroughly edition of 'An A-Z of English Grammar and Usage' - an established favourite among teachers - Geoffrey leech and his colleagues provide teachers and learners of English with a unique reference grammar. Accessible, easy-to-use, dictionary-like format. Comprehensive coverage of English grammar in over 600 fully cross-referenced entries. - common grammatical key words, such as 'more', 'what'', 'unless' 'can'. - Main terms for talking about grammar, meaning and usage, such as 'indirect object', 'pronoun', 'tag question'. - Extra language and communicative ehelp, such as 'greetings', 'introductions', 'punctuation', 'letter writing', e-mails'. Simple and clear explanations, supported by real-life examples, diagrams, and entertaining new illustrations Helpful notes on style, intonation, and British and American usage.

An A-Z of English Grammar & Usage

A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry

Over the years, pragmatics - the study of the use and meaning of utterances to their situations - has become a more and more important branch of linguistics, as the inadequacies of a purely formalist, abstract approach to the study of language have become more evident. This book presents a rhetorical model of pragmatics: that is, a model which studies linguistic communication in terms of communicative goals and principles of 'good communicative behaviour'. In this respect, Geoffrey Leech argues for a rapprochement between linguistics and the traditional discipline of rhetoric. He does not reject the Chomskvan revolution of linguistics, but rather maintains that the language system in the abstract - i.e. the 'grammar' broadly in Chomsky's sense - must be studied in relation to a fully developed theory of language use. There is therefore a division of labour between grammar and rhetoric, or (in the study of meaning) between semantics and pragmatics. The book's main focus is thus on the development of a model of pragmatics within an overall functional model of language. In this it builds on the speech avct theory of Austin and Searle, and the theory of conversational implicature of Grice, but at the same time enlarges pragmatics to include politeness, irony, phatic communion, and other social principles of linguistic behaviour.

Principles of Pragmatics

Geoffrey Leech is one of the pioneers of modern computer corpus linguistics. This Festschrift contains contributions from colleagues around the world who have been influenced, in various ways, by the approaches to language and text which Geoff pioneered. Many of the contributions focus (both synchronically and diachronically) on the English language, which has been Geoff's main interest throughout his career. However, work on Polish, French, Biblical Greek, and Creole studies is also reported, which demonstrates the influence that Geoff has had on scholars outside of English linguistics. The papers in this book - all given at the Corpus Linguistics 2001 conference held in Geoff's honour - cover a wide range of topics and applications within corpus linguistics, including corpus building and annotation, lexicology, syntax, sociolinguistics, stylistics and pragmatics.

A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech

Corpus Linguistics by the Lune

Michael H. Short

Since its publication in 1971, Meaning and the English Language has established itself as a standard textbook for studies in English Language. It deals with areas of the language that are of particular interest in themselves and which are especially difficult for learners to master: tense, progressive and perfect aspects, mood and the modal auxiliaries. There are numerous examples of differences and similarities in meaning throughout the book, making it a clear and precise guide to English. Updated for the language of the 21st Century, this edition will prove invaluable for learners and teachers alike.

Geoffrey N. Leech

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