English Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham
A quite distinct approach to corpus linguistics was developed at the University of Birmingham by John Sinclair. This school of corpus linguists:
- had a distinctive approach to the construction of corpora (the monitor corpus approach);
- questioned the process and utility of corpus annotation;
- developed the notion of collocation as a mainstay of analysis in corpus linguistics, especially in the analysis of meaning;
- and took a corpus-driven approach to the analysis of English grammar, in which words and grammar are ineluctably bound in what is called lexicogrammar (Halliday 1985, Sinclair 1991).
There is no space here for a full account of the distinctive and wide-ranging contribution to corpus linguistics made by the work of the Birmingham school. Its work is reviewed in depth in chapter six of McEnery and Hardie (2012) Corpus Linguistics: Method, theory and practice.
This page was last modified on Monday 16 April 2012 at 4:10 pm.