My brother, Gerry Nelson, who has died of cancer aged 63, after a short illness, was a researcher in English linguistics who coordinated the worldwide collection of volumes of English language data for linguistic research.
Gerry was born in Maynooth, Co Kildare, Ireland, one of four sons of Kathleen (nee Colgan) and Anthony Nelson. Our father was employed as a security guard at Maynooth University, where Gerry studied English before moving to University College Dublin for his PhD, which was in theories of linguistic form in the 18th century.
While studying, Gerry worked as a librarian, and he stayed with Kildare County Libraries until he joined the Survey of English Usage at University College London in 1992 as a research fellow. Almost immediately he became immersed in an ambitious project, the International Corpus of English, which became central to his academic life.
Initiated by Sidney Greenbaum in 1989, the ICE project required researchers to collect a million words of spoken and written English of the local variety, in multiple contexts, following strict sampling criteria. Gerry became the principal coordinator for the British component of ICE, from 1996 until its publication in 1998. From 2001 until 2016, he coordinated the international project.
In 2007, Gerry took up a professorship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he and his colleagues formed a significant centre of research in English language corpus linguistics. English in Hong Kong in the post-transfer period was a language under transition, from being an official language of a colonial outpost to the principal language of China’s political and commercial interface with the west (principally, the US). Within Hong Kong, English was in continuous contact with, and adapted to, Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as other languages of migrant communities.
Although he lived in Hong Kong after 2006, Gerry kept a property in London as a base and maintained strong connections with UCL right up to his death. He also continued to contribute to the ICE project which, under his stewardship, continued to grow. 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.
After he retired in 2020, as an emeritus professor, Gerry continued to have a close relationship with his English department colleagues in Hong Kong and London. He enjoyed travelling extensively in Europe and South-east Asia.
Gerry is survived by his three brothers, Colm, Thomas and me.
