John McHardy Sinclair

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

John McHardy Sinclair, who is better known without his Scottish name “McHardy“, was born on June 14th in 1933. He is 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," which was published in 1987. Further works include "Towards the Analysis of Discourse," which he published together with Malcolm Coulthard in 1975. As well as "Corpus, Concordance, Collocation," which he published in 1991, "Reading Concordances," 2003, "Trust the Text," 2004, and "Linear Unit Grammar," 2006. Besides these very influential works John Sinclair's work of a lifetime includes countless articles of linguistic nature. Sinclair founded the Tuscan Word Centre with his second wife Elena Tognini-Bonelli. This institution is well known for corpus-based language research and the training of corpus linguists. John Sinclair died on March 13th 2007 at the height of his powers and influence, leaving an invaluable legacy of linguistic ideas and methods.

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