John Sinclair (1933 – 2007)

Yesterday John Sinclair, corpus linguist and lexicographer, died in Florence.

Every scholar involved in empirical linguistics must recognize his immense contribution to the field, both at a theoretical and applied level. Author of many milestone-publications in lexicography and corpus linguistics, director and founder of the Cobuild project (and Bank of English), among his many contributions are major researches in dictionary and corpus design, computational lexicography, lexical collocations, English for special purpose and on language teaching and learning. John will also be always remembered for his intellectual generosity in discussing his and other's work and in encouraging dialogue and research.

In the last years he and Elena Tognini-Bonelli have lead courses and workshops on various aspects of corpus linguistics at the Tuscan Word Centre (Italy). The picture you see is from the last TWC in late October 2006 (photo by: U. Roemer).

Isabella Chiari

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The best way to start remembering is by keeping his intellectual inheritance:

Corpus and Text: Basic Principles John Sinclair (Tuscan Word Centre)

A list of his publications (up to 2000) can be found at: http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/research/archive/1999-2000/sinclairpubs.htm