In memory of Gerry Nelson

We are extremely sad to announce the death of our friend and colleague, Gerald (Gerry) Nelson, Professor Emeritus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has died following a short illness on 20 October 2022.

Gerry will be laid to rest on Saturday 3 December at 10am in St Mary's Catholic Church in his home town of Mynooth, Kildare, Ireland.

If you would like to leave a tribute to Gerry, you can do so here: https://uclsurveyofenglish.wordpress.com/2022/11/28/in-memory-of-gerry-nelso...

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Gerry was born in 1959 in Maynooth, Ireland, and studied at Maynooth University for his BA and MA. He received his PhD in theories of linguistic form in the 18th Century from University College Dublin, and worked in public libraries until he got what he referred to as ‘his big break’ in 1991, when he joined the Survey of English Usage as a Research Fellow on a three-year ESRC grant. This was followed by a two-year Leverhulme project, during which he contributed substantially to Sidney Greenbaum’s Oxford English Grammar. Later on, he took over the reins of three further editions of Sidney’s Introduction to English Grammar.

Gerry joined an ambitious project, the International Corpus of English (ICE), which became central to his academic life. This project, initially proposed by Sidney Greenbaum in 1989, would be a multi-centre international project. Every member of the network (some 20 teams) would create a corpus according to the same strict criteria, permitting English varieties to be meaningfully compared for the first time. Although this challenge later proved difficult, data would be collected synchronically within a short time window from 1990 to 1992.

Gerry and Sid updated Randolph Quirk’s Survey Corpus model of a corpus of both speech and writing, refining the design in a number of ways. There were to be more varied genres and contexts, texts would be shorter at 2,000 words each, and there were a number of practical stipulations on corpus participants, some of which were easier to apply than others! Crucially, every requirement would be applied equally to every variety of English captured by project teams – a task that proved challenging.

Gerry was the principal coordinator for the British Component of ICE, ICE-GB.

As well as obtaining recordings and texts, Gerry, the ex-librarian, had to obtain permission forms from a thousand participants, ranging from individuals to the BBC Copyright and Artists’ Department. Gerry designed the structural markup for transcribing and annotating the corpus.

Gerry took on the process of data collection and archival, and it was Gerry and Sid, with Nelleke Oostdijk and Hans van Halteren in Nijmegen, who applied the Quirk grammar to the corpus. The two books Comparing English Worldwide (1996, edited by  Greenbaum) and Exploring Natural Language (2002, authored with Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts) stand in testament to the huge contribution that Gerry made to the field of corpus annotation, and to the highly collaborative way of working that these projects represented.

Following Sidney’s death in 1996, Bas Aarts took over the reins as Director of the Survey, and Chuck Meyer in Boston initially coordinated the ICE project. Gerry remained the leader of the ICE-GB component, which was completed under his stewardship in 1998, with a second release in 2006.

Gerry was offered a Research Professorship at the University of Hong Kong in 2000, where he stayed for two years. He returned to UCL as a lecturer and became the Deputy Director of the Survey in 2002. It was during this second period at UCL that he worked on the Diachronic Corpus of Present Day Spoken English (DCPSE) corpus, which was released in 2006 alongside the second release of ICE-GB.

Gerry worked at the Survey from 2002 to 2007, when he left to take up a Chair at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he remained until his retirement in 2020.

In 2001, Gerry became the ICE project’s principal coordinator, a responsibility he undertook for fifteen years, finally handing over the project reins to colleagues in Zurich in 2016.

Under his stewardship, the ICE project continued to grow, despite the usual problems of funding. Gerry was the principal expert advising ICE teams around the world on their collection and annotation strategies, applying a healthy dose of humour and pragmatism to the inevitable challenges that corpus building in multiple jurisdictions by teams with limited resources inevitably represents. He was very well-known internationally, especially in the circles of scholars working on World Englishes.

Gerry was looking forward to further collaborations following his retirement. He continued to have a close relationship with his English Department colleagues at CUHK and UCL, and it was a terrible shock for all of us to hear of his untimely death in October 2022.

Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts Survey of English Usage University College London