John 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 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.

He was well-known for having unconventional ideas which helped to advance the young field of corpus linguistics. 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.

Notable works include Towards the Analysis of Discourse, which he published together with Malcolm Coulthard in 1975, Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, (Oxford University Press, 1991), Reading Concordances, 2003, Trust the Text, 2004, and Linear Unit Grammar, 2006.

After early retirement from his post as Professor of Modern English Language at Birmingham, Sinclair founded the Tuscan Word Centre with his second wife Elena Tognini-Bonelli. This institution provides training courses in corpus linguistics.

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