Hi,
I'm new to this forum. Today, while reading the last chapters of John Sincair's book, Trusting the text, I felt the urge to discuss it with people who might have read it or who are interested in the relationship between discourse and corpus linguistics.
I don't know, yet, whether discussing books of linguistic nature is acceptable here, or whether in this forum we can create a kind of book club of linguistics books or articles. But, I'll try to summarize, here, my impressions about Sinclair's book hoping to receive any sort of communication about it.
First of all, I admit Sinclair's ideas are revolutionary in a way, given the time the book was published. But I kind of feel his theory is not really well developed. He is more of backgrounding/highlighting linguistic problems without really offering a satisfying model or framework to approach these problems. Am I not fully getting the book? Or is it really that Sinclair's approach in this book doesn't account for a valid linguistic theory.
Secondly, sometimes I feel, specially in Part III, there are many extensive reflections and speculations from his part that aren't very scientific (not based on scientific evidence, or that are just based on sporadic examples).
Is there anyone else who thinks Sinclair's ideas are a bit outdated or don't really fit with corpus linguistics approaches to language?