John Sinclair , the  man I greatly admired , passed away  on March, 14, 2007.   " His death is a terrible loss to everyone knew him" , an article is attached here in memory of him.

John was born in 1933, attended George Heriot's School in Edinburgh and then read English Language and Literature at Edinburgh University, where he was awarded a First Class Masters degree. Following a spell of National Service in the RAF as an Education Officer, he returned to Edinburgh as a research student in 1958. 

Shortly afterwards, he was appointed to a lectureship in the Department of English Language and General Linguistics. In 1965, at the tender age of 31, John was elected to the foundation chair of Modern English Language at the University of Birmingham, the post from which he retired in 2000.

In the 1960's John established Modern English Language as a compulsory component of the undergraduate degree in English and made sure that English Language was accepted as an integral component of the B.Ed degree which was being established at that time in the West Midlands. At the same time he began his work on collocation and ran one of the very first research projects in computational linguistics, while at the same time leading a second research team, which produced the innovative task-based language development materials, Concept 7-9, which were specifically designed for native speakers. In the early 1970's two successive projects funded by SSRC established Birmingham internationally as a centre for research into spoken discourse.

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.

In 1995 John took partial early retirement, though, predictably, he did not retire; instead, with the help of Elena, he founded the Tuscan Word Centre, known internationally for corpus based language research and teaching.

It is a tribute to his vision and energy that, during his 35 years at Birmingham, the number of English Language staff increased from two to twenty-five and of Masters and Doctoral students from zero to almost 300. By the time of his retirement, it was no coincidence that Birmingham was internationally recognised as a centre of excellence in two of his areas of major interest - discourse analysis and corpus linguistics.