This volume presents the results of the international symposium Chunks in Corpus Linguistics
and Cognitive Linguistics held at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg to honour John
Sinclair's contribution to the development of linguistics in the second half of the twentieth
century. The main theme of the book highlighting important aspects of Sinclair's work is the
idiomatic character of language with a focus on chunks (in the sense of prefabricated items) as
extended units of meaning. To pay tribute to Sinclair's enormous impact on research in this
field the volume contains two contributions which deal explicitly with his work including
material from unpublished manuscripts. Beyond that the articles cover different aspects of
chunks ranging from more theoretically-oriented to more applied papers in which foreign
language teaching and the computational application of the insights about the nature of
language provided by corpus research play an important role.The volume demonstrates the wide
applicability and relevance of the notion of chunks by bringing together research from
different fields of linguistics such as theoretical linguistics psycholinguistics
computational linguistics and foreign language teaching and thus provides an interdisciplinary
view on the impact of idiomaticity in language.
