Book Review

Trusting the text

Corpus linguistics and stylistics
Sinclair, John (2004). Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse.
Edited with Ronald Carter. London: Routledge. (pp. ix+212)
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. Trust the text

This brief article provides a review of Trust the Text by John Sinclair, whose
untimely death in March of this year robbed corpus linguistics of one of its true
pioneers. I wrote the original draft of this article before John died and it has
been a difficult task to rewrite this in the light of his passing. I met John Sinclair
only twice but I count myself fortunate to have spent time in his company. His
friends and close colleagues will attest to his warmth and collegiality; for those
of us who did not know him so well, we are at least left with his considerable
body of work spanning numerous sub-disciplines of language study. As I shall
attempt to show in this review article, Sinclair’s work in corpus linguistics has
much to offer to linguists working in other areas. It is a rich legacy.
John Sinclair’s influence on modern linguistics is, of course, so apparent as
hardly to need stating, especially to readers of this journal. Perhaps best known
for his pioneering work in corpus-driven lexicography at Birmingham Univer-
sity, where he was responsible for the COBUILD project that resulted in the
highly-rated series of dictionaries, grammars and EFL materials, John Sinclair
was recognized internationally for his innovative research into the computa-
tional analysis of lexis, grammar and patterns of discourse. The widespread
influence that his work has had made him one of the leading figures in world
linguistics, and Trust the Text is an opportune collection of some of his most
important papers over the past twenty or so years (all of which were revised
for the book) that, taken together, give a valuable overview of his position on
language and language research. However, this book is not simply a valedic-
tory, not even now that, sadly, John Sinclair is no longer with us. This is because
Sinclair’s work continues to extend an influence over other spheres of language
study, both explicitly and implicitly, and seems set to do so for many years to
come. Trust the Text will appeal to a wide readership — even if those readers
might not all agree with what Sinclair has to say. In this brief article I aim to

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12:4 (2007), 563–575.

issn 1384–6655 / e-issn 1569–9811 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 564 Book Review

provide both a review of Trust the Text and a consideration of its potential for
influencing other areas of language study. Here I will consider particularly the
case of stylistics, which is one area which is beginning to see a rise in the use of
corpus methodologies. I write this review as a stylistician rather than a corpus
linguist and I, like many others, firmly believe that stylistics has much to gain
from the insights of corpus linguistics. Corpus stylistics is a growing sub-dis-
cipline of stylistics which has much to contribute to more traditional stylistic
approaches to text analysis. It goes without saying that I shall be urging my
‘non-corpus’ stylistics colleagues to read Trust the Text.
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2. The book in brief

Trust the Text is divided into three main parts. Part one, Foundations, compris-
es two chapters that form the theoretical base for the rest of the book. Part two,
The Organization of Text, is made up of five chapters devoted to the structure
of written discourse, and part three, Lexis and Grammar, concentrates on using
corpus analysis to illustrate the symbiotic relationship between vocabulary and
grammar. All of the theoretical positions outlined in the book are underpinned
by extensive corpus analysis, and the book as a whole provides a fascinating
insight into language that often seriously challenges received wisdom. In this
section I will briefly outline the content of Trust the Text, though I will reserve
most of my discussion of part two of the book for the next section, where I will
discuss Sinclair’s work in relation to current issues in stylistics.
In the first chapter, ‘Trust the text’, Sinclair outlines his methodological po-
sition, pointing out that linguistics as a discipline has developed on the basis of
“inadequate evidence” and “degenerate data” (p. 9; see Toolan (2007) for a fuller
critique of this chapter). This seems to me to be a disputation of the Chomsky-
an intuition-based approach to language research rather than, as Toolan (2007)
suggests, a claim about the quantitative lack of evidence which linguistics as a
discipline has tended to be based on. (As Toolan points out, to claim there has
been a quantitative lack of data is clearly not true). Sinclair’s espousal of corpus
linguistics as an alternative and superior methodology establishes linguistic
performance as being inseparable from, and equally as important as, linguistic
competence. Having outlined his position, one of Sinclair’s aims in this chapter
is to use corpus evidence to support his proposal for a move away from the no-
tion that texts are essentially “strings” of sentences all connected to each other
either anaphorically or cataphorically. Instead, he proposes that when we read
a text “the most important thing is what is happening in the current sentence”
 Book Review 565

(p. 13). So, for example, he explains that when we interpret pronominal refer-
ences in a text, we do this without necessarily referring back to the original
noun phrase which the pronoun in question relates to. Rather it is the case
that the previous sentences of the text are part of our immediately previous
experience, and in this way our experience of the text “is no different from any
other, non-linguistic experience” (p. 13). This position will strike a chord with
practitioners of cognitive stylistics, as this is very much the stance that Emmott
(1997) takes with her notion of ‘primed frames’ in contextual frame theory,
which Sinclair readily acknowledges. From this, Sinclair proposes that a better
definition of ‘the text’ is to say that it is whatever sentence is being processed at
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any one time. As Sinclair points out, although this might seem a fairly straight-
forward position to take, it is still somewhat unorthodox.
The content of Chapter two (‘The search for units of meaning’) will be well
known to corpus linguists. Sinclair further shows how the analysis of large cor-
pora can provide us with more accurate insights into the nature and structure
of language. He explains that most dictionaries present phrasal verbs and fixed
expressions in separate sections because they do not fit the model of the word
as the basic unit of meaning. He argues that this model, therefore, must be con-
sidered inaccurate, and proposes that a more accurate description of meaning
comes about if we go beyond the predictions of grammars (such as the fact that
transitive verbs take objects) and concentrate instead on lexical constraints (p.
28). As an example, Sinclair looks at the phrase naked eye, pointing out that
the core semantic meanings of each individual word in the phrase will not
lead us to a complete understanding of its meaning. By examining data from
the Bank of English he suggests that an accurate descriptor of the phrase is
‘visibility + preposition + the + naked + eye’ (as in visible to the naked eye)
and that this constitutes one complete lexical choice. Sinclair also points out
that this descriptor is often accompanied by a semantic prosody (Louw 1993)
of difficulty, as in, for example, too faint to be seen with the naked eye. Sinclair
further demonstrates this approach to meaning through the analysis of other
examples, such as the phrase true feelings, the verb brook and the word place. It
is a convincing display of how corpus analysis can shed light on units of mean-
ing and there are clearly important ramifications here for applied linguistics
(though see Hunston (2007) for a discussion of issues surrounding the notion
of semantic prosody).
In part two of the book, Sinclair turns his attention specifically to the struc-
ture of written discourse, and it is this work specifically that has particular
relevance for stylisticians. Whilst it is true that many stylisticians have em-
braced corpus methodologies, it is also the case that there remains much work
 566 Book Review

in stylistics that would benefit from the support of corpus data, and there are
many insights and issues in Sinclair’s work in this area that deserve greater
discussion. I will turn to this in Section 3.
In part three of the book, Sinclair uses corpus linguistics to explicate the
relationship between vocabulary and grammar. Chapter eight is an investiga-
tion of the problem of how a finite lexicon can give rise to an apparently infinite
number of meanings. The chapter follows on from Chapter two in proposing
that meaning is not intrinsic to specific words but comes about as a result of
such features as collocation and colligation. Sinclair discusses the notion of ‘re-
versal’, whereby the meaning of a word is determined through its cotext rather
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than through a particular ‘dictionary meaning’, and discusses the advantages of

a corpus-driven approach to meaning which distinguishes between ‘words’ and
‘lexical items’. Chapter nine continues with the discussion of the inadequacy of
a word-based lexicon for the analysis of texts, as Sinclair contrasts two views
on language — one which sees language as “primarily a carrier of messages”
(p. 149) and one which recognizes language as “a means of communication
that deals in much more complex communications than messages, although it
recognizes that messages are important, even though very difficult to define”
(p. 149). In Chapter ten (‘Lexical grammar’), Sinclair makes the pertinent com-
ment that despite the now general acceptance of linguistic corpora as powerful
research tools, most research using corpora still makes many of the assump-
tions about language that were in force before the advent of corpus linguistics.
He shows how a predilection among many linguists for existing (and, in many
cases, traditional) grammatical categories holds back the development of a
‘lexical grammar’; that is, a descriptive framework that will integrate grammar
and lexis equally. Chapter eleven (‘Phraseognomy’) constitutes a short example
of how corpora can be used to check intuitions about language, though in con-
trast with the big ideas presented in the rest of the book it sits fairly uncomfort-
ably with the other chapters. Nevertheless, Sinclair is always at his best when
analysing data, and as a result the chapter still makes for interesting reading,
with Sinclair demonstrating the kind of innate curiosity about language that
undoubtedly compels all linguists to do what they do.
Finally, in Chapter twelve (‘Current issues in corpus linguistics’), Sinclair
outlines what he sees as some of the problems for the future of corpus linguis-
tics. These include the inadequacy of small corpora, the problems associated
with corpus annotation and the issue of whether it will ever be possible for
computers to comprehend natural language. Some of his views (for example,
on the issue of annotation, about which more below) will excite disagree-
ment, particularly, perhaps, among those not trained in the techniques of the
 Book Review 567

Birmingham school of corpus linguistics, but even so there is much here to

inspire debate and, it is to be hoped, consequent positive developments in the
study of language.

3. Sinclair and stylistics

As I mentioned above, Trust the Text will be of relevance to many stylisticians

and I would like to turn to stylistics to demonstrate the influence that Sinclair’s
work has had and might have beyond the areas in which he himself specialised.
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In so doing I will provide a review and critique of part two of Trust the Text and
a consideration of some of the issues that Sinclair’s work raises for the practice
of stylistic analysis.

3. The organization of text

Stylistics is often marginalized by theoretical linguists and so it is interesting

not only that some of John Sinclair’s earliest work was in this area (e.g. Sinclair
1966) but also that, having devoted the majority of his career to corpus linguis-
tics, he neither excluded stylistics as a legitimate area of linguistic enquiry nor
subscribed to the view that stylistic research could not be approached both em-
pirically and objectively. For stylisticians, what is particularly refreshing about
Sinclair’s work in this area is that it does not marginalise the study of literature.
Indeed, he points out that
… no systematic apparatus can claim to describe a language if it does not
embrace the literature also; and not as a freakish development, but as a natural
specialization of categories which are required in other parts of the descriptive
system. (Sinclair 2004:51)

Unlike many linguists, then, Sinclair does not see the study of literary texts as
being beyond the interest and capabilities of theoretical linguistics. He does,
however, make what some might describe as a pertinent critique of stylistics
when he says that it “has neither established a sound theoretical position of
its own, nor grafted itself securely onto either of its parent disciplines” (p. 51),
these being, of course, linguistics and literature. (Of course, others might say
that the attraction and value of stylistics is precisely that it has not done this).
Chapter three of Trust the Text (‘Planes of discourse’) is the oldest paper
in the book, having been originally published in 1982, and in it Sinclair at-
tempts to outline a theoretical exposition of the relationship between language
 568 Book Review

and literature, involving what he terms ‘planes of discourse’. His thesis is that
there are two aspects to language in use. One is “continuous negotiation be-
tween participants” (p. 52), which he terms the ‘interactive plane of discourse’,
and the other is “a developing record of experience” (p. 52), termed the ‘au-
tonomous plane of discourse’. The differences between the two are as follows.
The interactive plane is in evidence in the language of many textbooks, as the
writer attempts to establish the sense of a personal relationship with the reader.
This may take the form of second-person address and interrogative structures.
With regard to the autonomous plane, Sinclair explains that “long stretches
of expository prose direct immediate emphasis on to the organization of the
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propositional content, and the reader seems to be given very few interactive
clues” (p. 54). Interactive elements such as turn-taking and direct address are
not relevant in texts located on the autonomous plane. Sinclair explains the
relationship between the two planes by considering Austin’s (1962) notion of
performatives. In a performative structure such as “I promise I’ll do the wash-
ing-up”, the interactive plane “performs” the action and the autonomous plane
reports its content (cf. the main and subordinate clauses). Sinclair thus argues
that ‘report’ is the syntactic category that relates the two planes of discourse.
He explains that report “transfers attention from the interactive to the autono-
mous plane within an utterance” (p. 56). This is illustrated by, for example, the
way in which a reply to a question incorporates the propositional content of
the preceding interrogative thereby moving the content of the original utter-
ance from the interactive plane to the autonomous plane. Sinclair then makes
the point that report can be recursive and that this is a property of fiction, in
so much as an author of a novel effectively reports that “an unspecified author
said that one of his characters said “…””. He then analyses a series of extracts
from David Lodge’s novel How Far Can You Go? to show how Lodge plays with
the complex discourse structure of prose fiction. For example, he shows how
Lodge the author creates the effect of having entered his own novel by using
first-person narration and having several facts about the narrator’s life cor-
respond with his own. The narrator quotes from correspondence he claims to
have received from a publisher concerning an earlier novel he wrote, and we as
readers are left unclear as to whether this correspondence genuinely exists in
the real world; an impossibility, of course, since there is no way that Lodge can
“return to the real planes of interaction within his own novel” (p. 63).
Sinclair’s analysis of How Far Can You Go? elucidates the model he pro-
poses and his discussion of the concepts of reporting and quoting pre-figures
current work in both discourse presentation (see for example Semino and
Short (2004)) and text world theory (Werth 1997). For example, the concept of
 Book Review 569

sub-worlds in text world theory (Werth 1997) has a clear relation to Sinclair’s
notion of sub-reports, and Short et al. (2002) have explored in depth the con-
cept of faithfulness in fictional discourse that is alluded to in Sinclair’s discus-
sion of the status of How Far Can You Go? as a “reported fictional quote offered
for evaluation” (p. 62). Nevertheless, even though the theoretical position he
adopts derives from corpus-driven research, it is still the case that the analysis
Sinclair presents is manual as opposed to computational. This does not seem
to accord with his assertion in chapter one that areas such as stylistics “have
remained at a modest level of achievement for a very long time, simply because
of the technical problems involved in validating statements” (p. 16) and that
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the kind of analysis carried out in stylistics is “still usually done by hand” (p.
16). Neither does this take into account recent developments in what is fast
becoming known as ‘corpus stylistics’ (see, for example, Adolphs and Carter
(2002) and Semino and Short (2004)), which would certainly have been pos-
sible, given the revisions which all the papers underwent before being included
in the book.
Chapter four (‘On the integration of linguistic description’) continues the
theme of the previous chapter and makes clearer the notions of interactive
and autonomous planes, as Sinclair proposes a model for understanding the
dynamic nature of discourse. Again, Sinclair is concerned with stylistics and
looks at spoken and written and literary and non-literary texts, examining such
aspects as the position of the author with reference to the text, indications of
argument, and the dominant verb form. However, he stops short of an evalua-
tion and interpretation of the texts he examines, thereby missing what is argu-
ably one of the main aims of stylistics (Stockwell 2002). On the back cover of
the book, Michael Hoey is quoted as saying that Sinclair’s work is “occasionally
maddening, often eye-opening, always brilliant”. For stylisticians, this lack of
interpretative comment, thereby missing the point of stylistic analysis, is an
example of Sinclair at his maddening best!
In Chapter five, Sinclair returns to his proposition that ‘the text’ is whatever
sentence is currently being processed by the reader, and suggests that prospec-
tion (as opposed to retrospection) is the most relevant aspect in explaining
the dynamic nature of discourse. Essentially, prospection is where the current
sentence leads the reader (or addressee) to expect something specific in the
following sentence; to use an example that Sinclair returns to at various points
in the book, the sentence “The implications are daunting” prospects an im-
minent discussion of “the implications” in question. Sinclair analyses a short
article by Randolph Quirk, originally published in The European, in order to
illustrate his argument that prospection is more important than retrospection.
 570 Book Review

The sentence “The Prince of Wales is among those who think it is high time
they [the British] should [learn foreign languages]” prospects very strongly
that the Prince of Wales will be mentioned in the next sentence. As a result
the pronoun he in the sentence that follows is prospected by the previous sen-
tence rather than being interpreted retrospectively as referring anaphorically
to the Prince of Wales. Essentially, what Sinclair is arguing is that interpreting
a text is less about referring back to sentences that have come before, and more
about prospecting forwards using the information in whatever sentence is cur-
rently being processed. This is certainly a more dynamic model of discourse
processing than traditional accounts. Prospection as a concept also has impor-
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tant implications for cognitive stylistics when we consider that most stylistic
analyses are still carried out retrospectively as opposed to online (though see,
in contrast, the protocol analyses in Short and van Peer (1989) and Alderson
and Short (1989)).
The final two chapters of part two of the book also contain valuable in-
sights for stylisticians. In Chapter six (‘The internalisation of discourse’), Sin-
clair examines the relationship between spoken and written language in order
to look at “the origin of complexity in sentence grammar” (p. 102). There is a
correlation here with work on point of view in language (e.g. Simpson 1993),
particularly as Sinclair discusses the notions of posture and speaker change.
This has potential relevance both for the stylistic analysis of prose fiction and
drama. In the case of the latter, Sinclair discusses the famous line from Hamlet,
“To be, or not to be, that is the question”, noting that or and that both realise
postural changes and that this is of particular importance when we consider
the status of soliloquies as often being exemplars of characters’ struggles with
a variety of conceptual viewpoints. The co-ordinating conjunction in Hamlet’s
speech effectively sets up an opposing viewpoint, and the conflict between the
two reflects Hamlet’s inner turmoil.
In Chapter seven (‘A tool for text explication’), Sinclair turns his attention
to using corpora to support critical discourse analysis, which, he argues, con-
stitutes a return to the original aim of linguistic stylistics, which was to “extend
the methodology of stylistics to make it relevant to any text” (p. 116). This use
of corpora to support stylistic intuitions has much to offer to the stylistician
and this method is becoming increasingly popular in stylistics research (see,
for example, Hoover (2003) and Mahlberg (Forthcoming)). Sinclair demon-
strates his approach through the analysis of a short extract from the summing
up of an appeal judge in a complex case concerning the proposed separation of
conjoined twins, a separation that would inevitably lead to the death of one of
the twins. Sinclair uses the concept of semantic prosody to examine the effect
 Book Review 57

of phrases from the text such as fatally compromised. In the case of this example
he shows through the analysis of corpus data that fatally compromised never
refers to death but to such things as images and judicial processes. He draws
the conclusion, therefore, that using fatally compromised in relation to death
(as the phrase is used in the base text he analyses) reduces the emotive power
of the word fatally, which seems appropriate given the complex moral issues
the judge is dealing with. Sinclair also shows how a particularly blunt state-
ment by the judge — “Jodie is entitled to protest that Mary is killing her” — is
foregrounded as a result of the euphemistic semantic prosody of the preceding
phrase, ceasing to live. By backgrounding the emotive aspect of this reference
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to death, the strongly emotive sentence that follows is heightened even further.
What is particularly appealing about the methodology that Sinclair employs
in this chapter is the fact that, here, he is clearly addressing the problem he
highlights in chapter three that stylistic analysis is “still usually done by hand”
(p. 16). The corpus-driven methodology he employs here provides a means of
obtaining empirical support for intuitions about the effects of particular words
and phrases. Furthermore, it should be clear from this chapter that using cor-
pus techniques in stylistic analysis does not necessarily mean a radical change
in analytical practice. Corpus linguistics methodologies do not need to sup-
plant established stylistic frameworks in order to be useful. Their value lies
in providing additional support for stylistic observations, and this should do
much to assuage the concerns of stylisticians worried by what may initially
be perceived as a replacement of traditional stylistic practices. Experimenting
with corpus techniques, then, is undoubtedly beneficial for stylisticians and
does not necessitate becoming a ‘corpus stylistician’ at the expense of other
areas of stylistic endeavour. As a very brief example of how corpus methodolo-
gies can be useful in stylistic analysis, my own fairly traditional analysis of hu-
mour in a sketch from the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe proposed that the
humour in the sketch in question (a satire on the Second World War) derived
in part from the use by one character of the phrase organised war. Intuitively,
this phrase seems unusual, but it requires corpus evidence to explain why. A
search of the BNC reveals that the most frequent collocate of organised within
a three word span is the noun crime, which appears as a collocate 60 times in 41
texts. In contrast, war appears as a collocate of organised just once in the BNC,
and in this case it precedes the word organised. Using the phrase organised war
is clearly collocationally deviant and gives war a semantic prosody of criminal-
ity which is appropriate given the satirical intent in the sketch (see McIntyre
(2006:40) for the full analysis of this text). My point here is that the analysis I
refer to was in no sense a full corpus stylistic analysis of the text but considering
 572 Book Review

corpus evidence gave the analysis a greater objectivity than it would otherwise
have had. The approach that Sinclair espouses in Chapter seven is designed to
demonstrate to stylisticians and critical discourse analysts that corpus analysis
need not subsume other aspects of text analysis, but can provide a level of ob-
jectivity that will improve the veracity of an analyst’s claims. Sinclair notes with
approval that some critical discourse analysts have embraced this method (he
cites Fairclough’s (1992) corpus analysis of the semantic prosody of the word
killer in the phrase killer riots) but he also counsels against relying on evidence
from corpora that he sees as too small. With this in mind, it is worth examining
another of Sinclair’s criticisms of the practice of corpus linguistics, since this
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criticism in particular affects stylistics.

3.2 Corpus annotation

It should be clear by now that Trust the Text has much to offer the stylistician.
Nevertheless, there is one aspect of Sinclair’s position on corpus linguistics with
which I suspect many stylisticians would take issue, and this is the practice of
using tags in a corpus. Sinclair makes his position on tagging clear in the final
chapter of Trust the Text:
I would like to caution against the overuse of […] the addition by hand of
what are called ‘tags’ — to indicate aspects of formatting or analysis that are
not apparent on the surface of the text. (Sinclair 2004:190)

Sinclair goes on to say that the use of tags is “a perilous activity” (Sinclair
2004:191) because of the propensity for the analyst to then study the tags as
opposed to the language. He also makes the point that “no matter how careful
one is the original text cannot be reliably retrieved” (Sinclair 2004:191); tag-
ging thereby destroys the integrity of the text. These are strong arguments and
clearly should be taken into account. However, it remains the case that there
are stylistic aspects of texts that cannot be uncovered via computational means
without recourse to annotation systems, as well as discourse types in which it
is necessary to annotate the text in order to be able to comment sensibly on the
stylistic effects generated therein. In the first case, Short et al.’s corpus stylistic
work on speech, writing and thought presentation in prose texts (see, for ex-
ample, Short et al. (1996), Wynne et al. (1998) and Semino and Short (2004))
is an example of an investigation that would have been impossible without the
use of an annotation system. For example, in the analysis of prose narrative,
free direct speech is formally indistinguishable from narration. This distinction
is only discernible by examining the context in which the string in question
 Book Review 573

occurs. It is therefore impossible to concordance examples of speech presenta-

tion using corpus-driven methods. Short et al.’s project therefore necessitated
the integration of tags via manual analysis for two reasons: first, the interpreta-
tion of elements of a prose text as constituting discourse presentation is depen-
dent upon context and, secondly, there is at present no way of automatically an-
notating texts for discourse presentation. For example, while it may be possible
in some cases to tag direct speech by developing a program to look for speech
marks within a text, (i) direct speech is not always presented in this way (cf. the
increasing use of the em-dash to indicate direct speech in contemporary fic-
tion) and (ii) this method is of no help in uncovering all those other instances
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of discourse presentation which do not involve the use of inverted commas (for
example, indirect and free indirect speech). Short et al.’s other reason for tag-
ging manually was to test the model of discourse presentation that was being
employed. The cline of speech and thought presentation that the project utilised
was first proposed in Leech and Short (1981), and had been developed through
the qualitative analysis of a small number of extracts from prose fiction. Short
and his project team were interested in testing the robustness of the model by
attempting to apply it to a large quantity of data in which every sentence would
receive a discourse presentation tag. The practice of carrying out this tagging
resulted in a refinement of the original model. In this instance, then, the very
practice of attempting to apply annotation systematically resulted in an im-
proved framework for the stylistic analysis of discourse presentation.
Annotation is also important when dealing with the stylistic aspects of cer-
tain discourse types, such as drama. For instance, it is clearly desirable when
analysing drama to make a distinction between what the characters themselves
say and the information that is conveyed in the stage directions. Similarly, we
would not wish to attach the same status to character names that precede char-
acters’ dialogue as we would to the dialogue itself, since the former belongs to
what Werth (1997) calls the discourse world and the latter to the text world. An-
notation provides a means of dealing with this issue. Furthermore, annotation
can be necessary in order to uncover the pragmatic aspects of dramatic (and
real life) dialogue, as Culpeper and Archer (2003) have shown. Their annota-
tion system is designed to deal with important pragmatic aspects of dialogue
(such as social class and who is being addressed in any given utterance) which
are not necessarily recognised formally in the surface structure of the text but
which are, nevertheless, important complicating factors when it comes to in-
terpreting the dialogue in question. In the case of stylistics, then, it is in some
cases necessary to focus our attention on the tags as well as the language.
 574 Book Review

Annotation, then, is clearly of use to the stylistician but it remains the case
that Sinclair’s warnings about the danger of annotation need to be borne in
mind. Leech’s (1993) proposed seven maxims to be observed when annotat-
ing corpora may be of assistance here, particularly his assertion that the an-
notation scheme should be such that it is possible to remove the annotations
entirely in order to revert to the raw text. Certainly, this is the minimum that
Sinclair would require (Sinclair 2005:5). What should have become apparent
throughout this section, though, is that Sinclair’s corpus-driven work on writ-
ten texts provides valuable insights for the stylistician, both analytically and
methodologically.
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4. Conclusion

The influence of John Sinclair’s work in corpus linguistics will be well known
to all corpus linguists and, as I hope to have shown in this brief article, there
are other areas of language study that are already benefiting from the analyti-
cal and methodological insights his work provides. Trust the Text is a valuable
book and a fitting reminder of John Sinclair’s invaluable contribution to the
study of language. There is much to be learned here, and even where disagree-
ment arises, this will undoubtedly stimulate the kind of thought and discussion
that is necessary if we are to increase our understanding of language and how
it works. John Sinclair’s real strength was his ability to see beyond established,
uncontested and often misguided beliefs about language, and to articulate what
linguistics as a discipline ought to be able to describe and explain. For this rea-
son, I recommend the book unequivocally.

References

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Reviewed by Dan McIntyre, University of Huddersfield

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