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John Sinclair
The Tuscan Word Centre |
Small words make big meanings |
Abstract
The hundred or so short and frequent words of English have two roles in the making of meaning. They sometimes give grammatical information, and so they are allotted to word classes. This tells us little about them as individuals, but it locks them up in the grammar, and we think of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs as the individual members of the vocabulary.
The study of the way words occur, pattern and combine in a large text corpus presents a different picture. Here, small words make big meanings. We must move on from a view of the vocabulary as consisting mainly of single-word items to one where phrase patterns are prominent and insistent. In the phrase patterns, all the constituent words are of equal status, and often it is the small, hardly-noticed words that provide the crucial identification of a meaningful unit.
For someone seeking mastery of a language there is a lot to be gained from working with the actual meaningful units from an early stage, avoiding needless analysis; corpus research, properly focused, can sharpen perceptions of meaning, offer accurate models of usage and speed up learning by concentrating on those patterns which are the most widespread and pervasive – those which involve the small words. |
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Biography
John M. Sinclair is Professor Emeritus of Modern English Language at the University of Birmingham , where he spent most of his career. His education and early work was at the University of Edinburgh (MA 1955), where he began his interest in corpus linguistics, stylistics, grammar and discourse analysis. He now lives in Italy, where he is President of The Tuscan Word Centre. He holds an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Gothenburg (1998), and an Honorary Professorship in the University of Jiao Tong, Shanghai. He is an Honorary Life Member of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain and a member of the Academia Europæa. He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Cobuild series of language reference materials. His recent books reflect current interests: Reading Concordances (Longman 2003), a text book; Trust the Text (Routledge 2004), a collection of his papers; English Collocational Studies (Continuum 2004), a record of the first research on electronic corpora of the 1960s; How to use corpora in language teaching, a collection derived from a TWC course, edited by Sinclair (Benjamins 2004).
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