John Sinclair

[Suzanne Kemmer]

Dear functional linguists and corpus linguists:

John Sinclair passed away this morning, at the age of 73.
A sad loss!

For those who don't know about his groundbreaking role
in developing the first large language corpora, and the
first large corpus-based language reference works,
I clipped this from the Univ. of Birmingham English Lg. Research   
site: www.english.bham.ac.uk/research/events/sinclair.htm

"By the late 1970s, when acting as a consultant to their Dictionary  
division, he persuaded Collins to invest in a radical new research  
project in computational lexicography, which involved the creation of  
the largest corpus of English language texts in the world. To support  
this, at the time by far the largest single research project the  
University of Birmingham had ever had, one of the first ever text  
scanners was bought at a cost of £70,000 and impoverished students  
worked day and night scanning in texts. This massive effort produced  
a corpus of amazing size - some 8 million words. By 2001 scanners  
cost £80, one-million-word personal corpora are ten a penny and the  
Bank of English contains some 400 million words. The first COBUILD  
dictionary was published in 1987, and a steady stream of corpus-based  
dictionaries, grammars and usage books followed, based on principles  
which have radically changed the way all publishers produce foreign- 
learner reference books."