Over a period of over forty years, Geoffrey Leech has made notable contributions to the field of literary stylistics, using the interplay between linguistic form and literary function as a key to the mystery of how a text comes to be invested with artistic potential.In this book, seven earlier papers and articles, read previously only by a restricted audience, have been brought together with four new chapters, the whole volume showing a continuity of approach across a period when a...

A Communicative Grammar of English has long been established as a grammar innovative in approach, reliable in coverage, and clear in its explanations. This fully revised and redesigned third edition provides up-to-date and accessible help to teachers, advanced learners and undergraduate students of English. Part One looks at the way English grammar varies in different types of English, such as ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, ‘spoken’ and ‘written’; Part Two focuses on the uses of grammar...

Based on the systematic analysis of large amounts of computer-readable text, this book shows how the English language has been changing in the recent past, often in unexpected and previously undocumented ways. The study is based on a group of matching corpora, known as the 'Brown family' of corpora, supplemented by a range of other corpus materials, both written and spoken, drawn mainly from the later twentieth century. Among the matters receiving particular attention are the influence of ...

Word Frequencies in Written and Spoken Englishis a landmark volume in the development of vocabulary frequency studies. Whereas previous books have in general given frequency information about the written language only, this book provides information on both speech and writing. It not only gives information about the language as a whole, but also about the differences between spoken and written English, and between different spoken and written varieties of the language. The frequen...

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 a...

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 similari...

Seeks to demonstrate that the study of English poetry is enriched by the insights of modern linguistic analysis, and that linguistic and critical disciplines are not separate but complementary. Examining a wide range of poetry, Professor Leech considers many aspects of poetic style, including the language of past and present, creative language, poetic licence, repetition, sound, metre, context and ambiguity.

The chapters in this volume feature new and groundbreaking research carried out by leading scholars and promising young researchers from around the world on recent changes in the English verb phrase. Drawing on authentic corpus data, the papers consider both spoken and written English in several genres. Each contribution pays particular attention to the methodologies used for investigating short-term patterns of change in English, with detailed discussions of controversies in this area. Th...

This book has evolved from a Workshop on Computerized Speech Corpora, held at Lancaster University in 1993. It brings together the findings presented in a clear and coherent manner, focussing on the advantages and disadvantages of particular transcription or mark-up practice.

The first book in the series that's great for fans of Glee!Chloe loves singing and spends hours practicing in her bedroom, miming into her hairbrush in front of thousands of imaginary fans. So when she gets the chance to audition for Rockley Park— the school for budding pop stars—Chloe’s determined to make the cut. But first she has to persuade her parents that her ambition is for real. She knows it’s going to be tough, but life in the music biz isn’t all glitz and glamour. Will Ch...