John Sinclair’s work is widely known and has had a far-reaching influence, particularly in the areas of corpus linguistics, lexis, phraseology, lexicography, grammar, and discourse analysis. This collection of papers, written by former colleagues at Birmingham University, looks at some key writings… read more
This paper presents a corpus-based study of English denominal adjectives in -like. Starting with semantic aspects, including the relationship between N-like and like an N, it then reports on the productivity of -like adjectives by discussing the kinds of nouns to which -like is added, along with… read more
This chapter discusses the treatment of phraseology in dictionaries: its specific focus is on collocation and on English. It first describes the collocational behaviour of three words (river, rivet, riven), as observed in a large corpus of current English. It then considers the ways in which their… read more
This paper reports on a corpus-based investigation of conventionalized English similes which follow the pattern (as) ADJECTIVE as NOUN GROUP. It begins by describing their formal and semantic characteristics, and then discusses issues of variation, approaches to handling variation, and procedures… read more
This paper discusses John Sinclair’s work in the field of lexicography by focussing on the first edition of the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (1987), which was written within the Department of English at the University of Birmingham, and of which Sinclair was Editor in Chief. It… read more
This article reports on two parallel but independent studies of idiom variation in corpora — one of Italian and one of English. In the Italian study, 324 idiomatic expressions were looked for in a corpus of 16 million words, while the English study investigated more than 2,800 idioms in an… read more
