Geoffrey Leech was Professor of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University from 1974 to 1996. He then became Research Professor in English Linguistics. He has been Emeritus Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language, Lancaster University, since 2002.He has written, co-authored or co-edited 25 books in the areas of English grammar, literary stylistics, semantics, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics and pragmatics. They include:"English in Advertising: A Linguistic Study of Advertising in Great Britain" (1966); "A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry" (1969); "Meaning and the English Verb "(1971, 2nd ed. 1987, 3rd ed. in preparation); "A Communicative Grammar of English "(with J. Svartvik) (1975, 2nd edn. 1994, 3rd edn. 2002); "Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose" (with M. Short) (1981); "Principles of Pragmatics" (1983); "A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language "(with R. Quirk, S. Greenbaum and J. Svartvik) (1985); "Spoken English on Computer: Transcription, Mark-up and Application" (ed. with G. Myers and J. Thomas) (1995); "Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora" (ed. with R. Garside and T. McEnery) (1997); "Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English" (with D. Biber, S. Johansson, S. Conrad and E. Finegan) (1999); "Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken English: based on the British National Corpus "(with P. Rayson and A. Wilson) (2001); "Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English "(with D. Biber and S. Conrad) (2002)