Sinclair Open Lecture Series
John Sinclair was one of the founding fathers of corpus linguistics - a discipline that has radically changed theories about language and approaches to the study of language.
The annual Sinclair Open Lecture honours the memory of Professor John Sinclair, who held the Chair of Modern English Language at the University of Birmingham from 1965 to 2000 and who was an internationally-renowned figure of influence in the world of Linguistics. The annual lecture was sponsored from 2006 to 2016 by Education Development Trust, an education charity that John Sinclair actively supported throughout his lifetime.
John Sinclair (1933-2007)
John McHardy Sinclair was born in 1933, and attended George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh. He read English Language and Literature at Edinburgh University and took a 1st class Masters degree. Following a spell in the RAF as an Education Officer, he returned to Edinburgh as a research student in 1958, and shortly afterwards was appointed lecturer in the Department of English Language and General Linguistics. In 1965, John was elected to the chair of Modern English Language at The University of Birmingham, a post which he held until 2000. By the late 1970s, he was a consultant to Collins Dictionaries. He persuaded them to invest in a radical new research project in computational lexicography, and in 1980 work on the Cobuild project began. The first dictionary, with John as Editor-in-Chief, was published in 1987, and a host of Cobuild dictionaries, grammars and usage books were subsequently published. In 1995, John founded the Tuscan Word Centre, a centre for language research and teaching.
John was a highly influential figure in many areas of research in English Language world-wide. He was a founder member of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, the British Association for Applied Linguistics, the International Association for Applied Linguistics, the Association for Language Awareness, and the Trans-European Language Resource Infrastructure, among other language-oriented Associations. In the 1970s and 1980s he was an Advisor on English Language at Nanyang Technological University and at the National University of Singapore. He was an Honorary Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow and an Adjunct Professor at Jiao Tong University, Shanghai. In 1998 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy by the University of Gothenburg. For much of his career, John was Head of English Language Research at the University of Birmingham.
The Sinclair Lecture is an annual event, sponsored by the Education Development Trust (formerly CfBT Education Trust), that marks John’s association with the Trust from 1968, as a member first of the Advisory Board, and later as a member of Council Management.
2025
Jack Grieve
Corpus linguistics is all you need: large language models and the legacy of John Sinclair
2024
Dawn Kinght
Applying corpus linguistics: impacts of corpus research in a minoritised language context
2023
Susan Hunston
From pattern to system: an exploration in lexical grammar
2022
Monika Bednarek
Language and characterisation in television series
2021
Dagmar Divjak
Of wo/men and machines: an interdisciplinary take on language in use
2019
Paul Baker
Look closer: insight and impact in corpus analysis of discourse
2018
Stefan Evert
The hermeneutic cyborg
2017
2016
Michaela Mahlberg
Corpus linguistics and the challenges of close and distant reading
2015
Ute Römer
Corpora, constructions, collaboration: providing new insights into the use and acquisition of verb patterns in English
2014
Sylviane Granger
John Sinclair’s idiom principle: an inspiration for learner corpus research
2013
Tony McEnery
Primed for violence? A corpus analysis of jihadist discourse