Professor Geoffrey Leech, a hugely influential scholar who has shaped several fields of linguistics, died suddenly on the 19th August, 2014. He was the author of over 30 books and 130 articles with massive impact. The major aim in this paper is to reflect on, and indeed to celebrate, Leech's contribution to pragmatics. The year 2013 saw the 30th anniversary of the publication of his Principles of Pragmatics (1983). This book, along with Levinson’s Pragmatics (1983), became a classic foundational text in pragmatics. A few weeks before Leech died, his second major book in pragmatics appeared: The Pragmatics of Politeness (2014). The work that dominated the interlude was his work in English grammar and corpus linguistics. Leech’s work on the analysis and description of English grammar is of particular note. He is unique in having contributed to all the three team projects that resulted in large-scale descriptive reference grammars of English, all published as lengthy single-volume works: A Grammar of Contemporary English (with Quirk, Greenbaum and Svartvik, 1972); A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (with Quirk, Greenbaum and Svartvik, 1985); and the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (LGSWE) (with Biber, Johansson, Conrad and Finegan 1999). Together, these grammars have been broadly regarded as providing an authoritative ‘standard’ account of English grammar, and shape numerous spin-off grammars and educational materials around the world. An important strand in Leech's work, and one that underpins all three grammars mentioned above, has been the use of computer corpora for the analysis and processing of the English Language. Leech's concern with usage and context is a thread that runs throughout his career. Witness the fact that in the domain of grammar he produced, with Jan Svartvik, A Communicative Grammar of English (1975), which developed an innovative approach to grammar, relating forms and structures to their meaning and use. His work on grammar and especially computer corpora soaked up a vast amount of his time. Leech's work on pragmatics grew out of his work on semantics (cfr. Semantics (1974)). From around that point, Leech had been developing an interest in pragmatics, stimulated by controversies about meaning in linguistics, as well as the work of Grice and Austin. He began to publish papers about the border between semantics and pragmatics, arguing that there was indeed a border, and that pragmatics could not be subsumed within semantics or ignored by linguistics. This resulted in his book Explorations in Semantics and Pragmatics (1980), covering metalanguage, performatives and politeness. However, Leech felt that that treatment was inconclusive, and so started work on Principles of Pragmatics (1983) The vision of pragmatics that identified the notions “pragmalinguistics” and “sociopragmatics”, and the maxim-based view of politeness are here focused upon. Although Leech attributed the formulation of the pragmalinguistic/sociopragmatic distinction to Jenny Thomas (1981,1983), he certainly had a hand in developing these notions, and moreover mapped out a view of pragmatics incorporating them. Pragmatics, in this view, can be approached by making the following three distinctions: General pragmatics: “the general conditions of the communicative use of language” (1983,10); Sociopragmatics: “more specific ‘local’ conditions on language use” (1983,10); and Pragmalinguistics: “the particular resources which a given language provides for conveying particular illocutions” (1983,11). Pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics are not considered sub-categories of general pragmatics, which “exclude[s] more specific ‘local’ conditions on language use” (1983,10), but complementary areas of study within pragmatics as a whole. The importance of the pragmalinguistic / sociopragmatic distinction to the field has been recognised. Furthermore, the distinction has proved to be particularly useful to scholars working in the areas of cross-cultural pragmatics and second language pragmatics. Leech (2003,104) states that politeness is situated in the field of sociopragmatics, because that research is geared towards “explaining communicative behaviour” (Leech 2003,104). Meanings, including understandings of politeness, emerge in the flux of social interaction. Leech was not the first to propose a maxim-based view of politeness. Credit for that goes to Robin Lakoff (1973). However, at the heat of Leech’s (1983) more developed Politeness Principle (hereafter PP) was the idea that it was involved in ‘trade-offs’ with the Cooperative Principle (Grice 1975). In fact, it is this that lends it explanatory power: the Cooperative Principle accounts for how people convey indirect meanings, the PP accounts for why people convey indirect meanings. Leech (1983,81) defines the PP as follows: ‘“Minimize (other things being equal) the expression of impolite beliefs […] (Maximize (other things being equal) the expression of polite beliefs”)’ [there is a corresponding, but less important, positive version]. Note that the PP is not confined to dealing with impolite beliefs. One of the factors that motivated a return to his work on politeness, first papers (e.g. 2003, 2007) and then a book (2014), was the fact that the PP was often misconstrued. One criticism was that it purported to be a universal theory of politeness (e.g. Wierzbicka ([1991] 2003,ix). Yet in fact, Leech suggests that the PP maxims may be weighted differently in different cultures (1983,150). A more legitimate ‘open question’ was that Leech dwelled almost entirely on English data, building theory in the light of that data. Leech was aware of this issue, which is one important reason why he wrote Leech (2007), drawing examples particularly from Chinese, Korean and Japanese, demonstrating that his framework, in somewhat revised form, worked perfectly well. This is not to say, of course, that all the details have been fully tested. An issue that is relevant to the early English bias concerns the relationship between politeness and indirectness. Locher (2004), as Bousfield (2008,52) criticise Leech for ignoring the fact that indirectness can even be impolite, but Leech (1983,171) also postulated the idea that indirectness can increase impoliteness. Of course, Leech would be the first to admit that the bi-directional correlation between indirectness and politeness/impoliteness does not apply in all contexts, and that other factors, aside from indirectness, affect politeness and impoliteness. Another site of critical comment concerns Leech’s distinction (1983) between “absolute politeness” and “relative politeness”. More recently, Leech (2007) changed the labels of these two types of politeness to a “semantic politeness scale” and a “pragmatic politeness scale”, and, importantly, clarified that these are “two ways of looking at politeness” (2007,174); that is, there is no claim that there are two discrete types of politeness. Leech's notion of politeness is thoroughly pragmatic. In fact, it is precisely Leech’s (1983) inclusion of the term “belief” that incorporates the perception of participants. In the absence of this, there is no explicit acknowledgement that the definition of politeness or impoliteness has anything to do with what participants mean and understand by an expression. Without this aspect, it is difficult to account for how the same expression can have different politeness values when perceived by different people, in different situations, cultures, and so on, or even how an apparently polite expression can be used for sarcasm. A common criticism is that Leech’s framework is unconstrained, involving a proliferation of maxims. (e.g. Brown and Levinson (1987,4), but then again, so does Brown and Levinson’s framework. This paper also briefly considers Leech's contribution to sarcasm and banter, a contribution that has been of particular use in the realms of impoliteness. In Leech’s (1983,82,142) statement on the Irony Principle (IP)), the essential idea is of mock politeness for social disharmony. Culpeper (1996) labels such phenomena “sarcasm”. Leech (1983) describes the opposite of mock impoliteness within his Banter Principle. One of the major lacunae in Brown and Levinson (1987) is that they do not treat banter at all. The PP and its revised version have been applied rather less though than Brown and Levinson (1987), with notable exceptions (e.g. Brookins 2010). One obvious reason for this is that there was never a great deal of guidance as to how to apply it. Most of Leech's discussion in PoP revolved around the Tact maxim and how to apply it, not around the other maxims. Too many politeness studies have been blighted by simplistic politeness analyses involving (formal) strategy spotting. Strategies are not enough. As Leech might have pointed out, one also needs to consider the other side of the coin: forms relative to typical situational norms. Interestingly, Leech's 2014 book The Pragmatics of Politeness bolsters the formal or pragmalinguistic side of his work. He saw this as something of a corrective to the concentration of recent studies focussing on the “big-picture view of how politeness relates to social behaviour and society in general” (2014,ix). Also, he presumably would not deny the influence of his personal taste for more micro and more focussed linguistic matters.