description John Sinclair Overview
John Sinclair (1933–2007) was a British linguist who pioneered the use of computer corpora in the study of language and lexicography. As director of the COBUILD project at the University of Birmingham, he oversaw the creation of the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary, the first major learner's dictionary built on a large corpus of authentic text. His work demonstrated how frequency data and collocation patterns could inform definitions and language teaching.
help John Sinclair FAQ
What was revolutionary about John Sinclair's COBUILD dictionary?
The Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary, first published in 1987, based its descriptions on evidence from a large computer corpus. It also explained words in full sentences, showing typical grammar and context instead of relying only on compressed definitions.
What is the Bank of English?
It was a large electronic collection of authentic spoken and written English developed through the COBUILD project. Sinclair and his colleagues used it to identify recurring word combinations and real patterns of usage.
How did Sinclair change the way dictionaries use examples?
His corpus-led approach favored examples and definitions grounded in language people had actually produced. This made common collocations, such as words that repeatedly occur together, central to lexicographic description.
What did John Sinclair mean by the idiom principle?
The idiom principle proposes that speakers often select partly preconstructed phrases rather than assembling every sentence one independent word at a time. Sinclair contrasted this with the open-choice principle in his work on corpus linguistics.
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