John McHardy Sinclair

John McHardy Sinclair (14 June 1933 – 13 March 2007) was a Professor of Modern English Language at Birmingham University from 1965 to 2000. He pioneered work in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, and language teaching.

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.[1]

Commemorative plaque on the Birmingham University campus

Sinclair was a first-generation modern corpus linguist and the founder of the COBUILD 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.[2][3]

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.[4] 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, a UK education charity that Sinclair supported during his lifetime.[5]

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.[6]

His sister was lexicographer B. T. S. Atkins.

He died of cancer[7] 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.

Further reading
  • Rosamund Moon (2009). Words, grammar, text: revisiting the work of John Sinclair. John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 978-90-272-2248-0.
  • Julia Lavid (2007). "To the memory of John Sinclair, Professor of Modern English Language. Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense". Vol. 15. pp. 9–12.

References
  1. Thomas Herbst, Susen Faulhaber, Peter Uhrig. "A Tribute to John Sinclair." The Phraseological View of Language. Walter de Gruyter, 2011, p. 2.
  2. The phraseological view of language : a tribute to John Sinclair. John Sinclair, Thomas Herbst, Susen Faulhaber, Peter Uhrig. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 2011. ISBN 978-3-11-025701-4. OCLC 775362448.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  3. Stubbs, Michael (30 November 2011). A tribute to John McHardy Sinclair (14 June 1933-13 March 2007). De Gruyter Mouton. doi:10.1515/9783110257014.1. ISBN 978-3-11-025701-4.
  4. Seretan, Violeta (4 January 2011). Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-94-007-0134-2.
  5. "Sinclair Open Lecture series". University of Birmingham. Retrieved 19 October 2023.
  6. Nørgaard, Nina, Beatrix Busse and Rocío Montoro, 2010. Key Terms in Stylistics. London: Continuum. p. 201
  7. Hoey, Michael (2 May 2007). "Obituary: John Sinclair". the Guardian. Retrieved 25 March 2022.
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