In a recent paper advocating a corpus-based and probabilistic approach to grammar development, <cite>Black, Lafferty, and Roukos (1992)</cite> argue that "the current state of the art is far from being able to produce a robust parser of general English" and advocate "steady and quantifiable," empirically corpus-driven grammar development and testing. <cite>Black et al.</cite> are addressing a community in which armchair introspection has been and still is the dominant methodology in many quarters, but in some parts of Europe, corpus linguistics never died.