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.

[1] 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] Sinclair was known for having unconventional ideas which helped to advance the young field of corpus linguistics.

[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.

John McHardy Sinclair and Anna Mauranen Linear Unit Grammar: Integrating Speech and Writing.