John McHardy Sinclair (14 June 1933 – 13 March 2007) was a Professor of Modern English Language at

Birmingham University , mottoeng = Through efforts to heights , established = 1825 – Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery1836 – Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery1843 – Queen's College1875 – Mason Science College1898 – Mason Univers ...

from 1965 to 2000. He pioneered work in

corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus (plural ''corpora''), its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora ...

discourse analysis Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the analysis of written, vocal, or sign language use, or any significant semiotic event. The objects of discourse Analysis (discourse, writing, conversation, communicative event) ...

lexicography Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries. * Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries. * Theoreti ...

, and

language teaching Language education – the process and practice of teaching a second or foreign language – is primarily a branch of applied linguistics, but can be an interdisciplinary field. There are four main learning categories for language educatio ...

Biography

Moving from Scotland to Birmingham in 1965 with his wife Myfanwy Sinclair and their three children, John Sinclair began work at the University of Birmingham as the foundation chair of Modern English Language. Sinclair Bench in Birmingham

Sinclair was a first-generation modern corpus linguist and the founder of the

COBUILD COBUILD, an acronym for Collins Birmingham University International Language Database, is a British research facility set up at the University of Birmingham in 1980 and funded by Collins publishers. The facility was initially led by Professor Jo ...

project. This project's aim was to build corpus-driven lexicons for foreign learners of English. He became chief adviser of Collins' ''Cobuild English Language Dictionary,'' whose first edition was published in 1987. He was known for having unconventional ideas which helped to advance the young field of corpus linguistics. His ''Corpus, Concordance, Collocation'' formulated the ''idiom principle''. Though he had written many books, at his valedictory lecture in 2000 he stated that none of his many published articles passed successfully through peer-review, and that even an article he had been invited to write for a journal was peer-reviewed by mistake and rejected. Since 2000, the University of Birmingham has hosted the Sinclair Open Lecture series. This speaker series was sponsored from 2006 to 2016 by

Education Development Trust Education Development Trust (formerly CfBT Education Trust) is a large not-for-profit organisation which provides education services in the United Kingdom (UK) and internationally. The charity is based in Reading, UK. History Tony Abrahams fou ...

, a UK education charity that Sinclair supported during his lifetime. After early retirement from his post as Professor of Modern English Language at Birmingham, Sinclair was the director and co-founder, with his second wife Elena Tognini-Bonelli - with whom he had two children -, of the Tuscan Word Centre, an institution that provides training courses in corpus linguistics. His sister was lexicographer

B. T. S. Atkins Beryl T. "Sue" Atkins (née Sinclair; 23 January 1931 — 3 September 2021) was a British lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data. Biography Sue Atk ...

. He died of cancer in March, 2007 at age 73.

Key publications

John McHardy Sinclair and Malcolm Coulthard. ''Towards an Analysis of Discourse: The English Used by Teachers and Pupils.'' Oxford University Press. 1975. John McHardy Sinclair and David Brazil. ''Teacher Talk.'' Oxford University Press. 1982. John McHardy Sinclair. ''Corpus, Concordance, Collocation.'' Oxford University Press. 1991. John McHardy Sinclair. ''Reading Concordances: An Introduction.'' Pearson/Longman. 2003. John McHardy Sinclair. ''Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse.'' Routledge. 2004. John McHardy Sinclair. ''How to use Corpora in Language Teaching.'' John Benjamins Publishing. 2004. John McHardy Sinclair and Anna Mauranen '' Linear Unit Grammar: Integrating Speech and Writing.'' John Benjamins Publishing. 2006.

References

External links

John Sinclair's obituary in the Guardian Newspaper

The Tuscan Word Centre
{{DEFAULTSORT:Sinclair, John Mchardy 1933 births 2007 deaths Academics of the University of Birmingham Corpus linguists Linguists from the United Kingdom 20th-century linguists

Biography

Key publications

Further reading

References

External links