A Textual Approach to “Neo-Firthian Corpus Linguistics”

John Sinclair was a prominent corpus linguist and received both great admiration and criticisms in his academic life. This paper dwells on McEnery & Hardie's new textbook of corpus linguistics and challenges its criticism of Sinclair. The paper argues that the label "neo-Firthian Corpus Linguistics" was misassigned to Sinclair and that Sinclair's ideas of unit of meaning and corpus-driven research were misread. The paper attempts to clarify some basic positions and ideas of corpus driven research through literature research and discussion.