John McHardy Sinclair

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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 is to build corpus-driven lexica 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. With the assistance of his second wife Elena Tognini Bonelli, the Tuscan Word Centre was founded by John Sinclair. This institution is well known for corpus-based language research and the training of corpus linguists. At the highpoint of his scientific career John Sinclair died on March 13th in 2007 leaving the world new linguistic ideas and concepts of the structure of man's speech.