Outline of a piece of written work concerning corpora

1. Select one or more questions that might be asked that could be addressed with the help of a corpus. These could be stylistic, grammatical, lexicological, etc. in scope; examples are scattered around the webpointers given in this site as well as in the references.
2. Describe how the questions might be answered with the help of a corpus.
3. Describe how the questions can be expressed as 'effective procedures' that some corpus program can interpret -- that means, what kind of searches (strings, string patterns, structural patterns, etc.) would be ideal..
4. Describe a selection of corpora that are available, their markup (if any), and tools for using them.
5. Describe how the tools/markup allow you (or not) to ask the questions set out in (3).
6. Compare how the different corpora and their tools either help or hinder your questions.