Gerry Nelson, my beloved brother, passed away at the age of 63 after fighting a brief battle with cancer. He was a renowned researcher in the field of English linguistics and played a pivotal role in the coordination of the worldwide collection of English language data for linguistic research.
Gerry was born in Maynooth, Co Kildare, Ireland, to Kathleen (nee Colgan) and Anthony Nelson. Our father worked as a security guard at Maynooth University, where Gerry pursued his studies in English before moving on to the University College Dublin to obtain his doctoral degree in theories of linguistic form in the 18th century.
During his academic career, Gerry worked as a librarian and was associated with Kildare County Libraries for a long time. In 1992, he joined the Survey of English Usage at the University College London as a research fellow. He soon got involved in a large-scale project known as the International Corpus of English (ICE) initiated by Sidney Greenbaum in 1989. This ambitious project required researchers to collect a million words of spoken and written English from the local variety across various contexts following strict sampling criteria. Gerry led the British component of ICE from 1996 until its publication in 1998 and coordinated the international project from 2001 to 2016.
In 2007, Gerry became a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he and his team conducted significant research in corpus linguistics related to the English language. The English language underwent a transition period in Hong Kong in the post-transfer era, where it transformed from an official language of a colonial outpost to the primary language for China’s political and commercial interaction with the west. Its use in Hong Kong, involving Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as other migrant community languages, continued to evolve.
Although he lived in Hong Kong after 2006, Gerry maintained strong connections with University College London and kept a property in London as his home base. He continued to contribute to the ICE project even after his retirement in 2020 as an emeritus professor, providing valuable advice to ICE teams worldwide on their collection and annotation strategies with his trademark humour and practicality.
Gerry remained close to his colleagues in the English department in Hong Kong and London after his retirement and enjoyed extensive travelling in South-east Asia and Europe.
Gerry is survived by his three brothers, Colm, Thomas, and myself.
