To those in the know, the Presidency of the MHRA ranks as a singular honour. And contemplating one's Presidential Address is apt to concentrate the mind wonderfully, to echo DrJohnson from a less honourable context. I take it that the purpose of a Presidential Address is to discuss a wide problem in a personal perspective. Nitty-gritty technicalities, such as those produced by linguists for other linguists of the same persuasion, should go into specialist journals. And speaking impersonally, without airing one's own views, opinions, prejudices, and reminiscences, would be to betray the trust of one's electors. With such principles in mind, I have chosen to talk about what I see as the main developments in linguistics during the half-century from the I94os, when I began my studies, until the I99os, when I presume my activities will decrease in inverse proportion to the years. I also want to articulate the caveat that my views are inevitably personal: there may be those who share them, and there will be many who do not. I plead guilty to a contentious selectivity. The past is an alien land, as the saying goes. I should like to suggest that the past can be a land half alien, half familiar. There is a fascination in pictures of, say, the Strand in the days of Queen Victoria or of the Champs Elysees of Haussmann's Paris. The topography and some of the buildings we recognize, but the people wear old-fashioned clothes and use old-fashioned vehicles. And there is something missing, such as cars and motorbuses. I have had something of the same sensation when returning to the linguistics I started with, almost halfa century ago. Many of the landmarks are familiar. Some are still with us, though weathered and worn, but many of the things we take for granted today just are not there. One feature conspicuous by its absence is the computer. In 1940, if a linguist wanted to write about a problem in English grammar, he had to go into his library and start hunting for, and excerpting, examples. Like our past President, Otto Jespersen, he might well spend a lifetime filling his house with slips even before he could start writing his grammars. Today, the first step as we carefully teach our students is to put the tapes of available corpora of English into our p.c. to see what mileage we can get from the work of others. To take an example from English: the now-classic corpora the Brown named after Brown University, the LOB named after the Universities of Lancaster, Oslo, and Bergen, and the no less obviously christened London-Lund corpus are now available on tape, in some instances in print, and also in classified form including concordances and grammatical tags. Yet what we have today is just a beginning. For English we shall soon have a network of interlocking corpora, including the Englishes of other continents, and for several other languages similar aids will be forthcoming. It is particularly appropriate to speak about corpus linguistics here in University College London, where much of