Corpora and experimental methods: A state-of-the-art review

This paper offers a state-of-the-art review of the combination of corpora and experimental methods. Using a sample of recent studies, it shows (i) that psycholinguists regularly exploit the benefits of combining corpus and experimental data, whereas cot-pits linguists do so much more rarely, and (ii) that psycholinguists and corpus linguists use corpora in different ways in terms of the dichotomy of exploratory/descriptive vs. hypothesis-testing as well as the corpus-linguistic methods that are used. Possible reasons, for this are suggested and arguments are presented for why (and how) cot-pits linguists should look more into the possibilities of complementing their corpus studies with experimental data.