Reading Concordances. John Sinclair; London: Longman,

Prof. John Sinclair’s pioneering role in the field of ELT as editor-in-chief of the Collins-Cobuild dictionaries and grammar is well known. Just as remarkable has been his contribution to the development of modern language theory, particularly as regards the relationship between grammar and lexis. He has successfully illustrated how technological developments, principally the advent of electronic corpora and the software to interrogate them, influence and refine perceptions of language and how these clearer perceptions affect both linguistic theory and pedagogical practice. The present volume also has a dual impetus: one pedagogical, the other theoretical. On one level, it is a textbook which aims to introduce corpus work to ‘students, researchers and workers in the language’, more specifically, to show them how to ‘interrogate a corpus in order to retrieve evidence that is relevant to a linguistic enquiry‘ and then to refine those queries further until a ‘neatly organised body of evidence’ (p. ix) is available as a report on the findings. On the second, a large number of theoretical points are made, and despite the disclaimer that ‘they are not gathered and organised into a specific stance’ (p. ix), the reader is guided in Socratic question-answer fashion to an appreciation of what, elsewhere, Sinclair has called 'lexical grammar'.