Geoffrey Leech has been one of the founder figures of computer-aided corpus linguistics – a field in which his name will remain associated with key resources and important breakthroughs. His wide-ranging scholarly interests, his willingness to debate his ideas with scholars of different methodological persuasions to his own, his generous mentorship of younger scholars and his ability to present linguistic issues to an interested lay public will ensure him a lasting reputation beyond corpus linguistics. Geoff Leech was born in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, where he attended the small but reputable local grammar school. After his national service in the Royal Air Force, spent (mostly on the ground) in West Germany, he started his bachelor studies at University College London in 1956. It was obviously a case of the right person in the right place at the right time: a highly motivated student with a keen interest in the study of language confronting and benefitting from a most congenial and stimulating working environment and intellectual climate. It was the time in British academia when various language-related strands of research began to coalesce into the fully fledged academic discipline of linguistics as we know it today. As he himself put it many years later: ‘I regard it as the most fortunate accident of my career that when I went to study at University College I chanced upon a magic circle of leading scholars in the study of language’ (Leech, 2002: 155). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, inspiration for Geoff Leech came from the UCL phoneticians (Daniel Jones, A.C. Gimson and J.D. O’Connor), from John Rupert Firth (Britain’s first designated professor of linguistics), from M.A.K. Halliday (Director of UCL’s short-lived Communication Research Centre or CRC, where a research studentship sponsored by a commercial television broadcaster laid the foundations for Geoff Leech’s master’s thesis on the topic of English in advertising (see Leech, 1966), and above all, of course, from Randolph Quirk, who introduced Geoff Leech to the then yet-to-be-digitised Survey of English Usage (SEU) corpus

In this paper, I discuss the ways in which multimedia annotation software is being used to transform an archive of Auslan recordings into a true machine-readable language corpus. After the basic structure of the annotation files in the Auslan corpus is described and the exercise differentiated from transcription, the glossing and annotation conventions are explained. Following this, I exemplify the searching and pattern-matching at different levels of linguistic organisation that these annotations make possible. The paper shows how, in the creation of signed language corpora, it is important to be clear about the difference between transcription and annotation. Without an awareness of this distinction – and despite time consuming and expensive processing of the video recordings – we may not be able to discern the types of patterns in our corpora that we hope to. The conventions are designed to ensure that the annotations really do enable researchers to identify regularities at different levels of linguistic organisation in the corpus and, thus, to test, or build on, existing descriptions of the language.

In this paper, we use corpus-based, multi-dimensional analysis ( Biber, 1988 ) to investigate the structural and functional linguistic variation in online language represented by blogs, micro-blogs, workplace e-mails, discussion posts and reader comments, and online newspaper and opinion columns. The primary goal of this study is to identify the statistically co-occurring features of online language and compare their distributions across web registers. The data used in our analysis came from an exploratory corpus of online texts (containing approximately 16,501,785 words) collected from various public domains from 2006 to the present. A combined automated and manual collection of texts was conducted across registers and the resulting corpus was grammatically tagged using the Biber tagger. Results show that the four primary functional dimensions of web registers are: (1) Personal Narrative Focus versus Descriptive, Informational Production; (2) Involved, Interactive Discourse; (3) Complex Statement of Opinion; and (4) Past versus Present Orientation.

This paper continues the detailed account of the central steps involved in compiling and distributing the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP). In this paper, we discuss the annotation process used to encode MICUSP files in TEI-compliant XML, and the development of MICUSP Simple, the online application through which the corpus is now freely available online. We also describe how MICUSP Simple can be used to carry out simple word/phrase searches and to browse papers within different categories.

Iberia is a synchronic corpus of scientific Spanish designed mainly for terminological studies. In this paper, we describe its design and the infrastructure for its acquisition, processing and exploitation, including mark-up, linguistic annotation, indexing and the user interface. Two pre-processing tasks affecting a large number of words are described in detail: de-hyphenation and identification of text fragments in other languages. We also show how some of the reported statistics, namely, dispersion and association, are used for research on lexis.

Iberia is a synchronic corpus of scientific Spanish designed mainly for terminological studies. In this paper, we describe its design and the infrastructure for its acquisition, processing and exploitation, including mark-up, linguistic annotation, indexing and the user interface. Two pre-processing tasks affecting a large number of words are described in detail: de-hyphenation and identification of text fragments in other languages. We also show how some of the reported statistics, namely, dispersion and association, are used for research on lexis.