ABSTRACT
Suppose you had an argument with a friend as to whether Sherlock Holmes ever said ‘elementary, my dear Watson’ (he didn’t!) and you wanted to prove your case; how would you go about doing it? One option would be to read all of the novels and short stories, but presumably you would have to get your friend to do the same to verify the truth of what you find. The other would be to turn to an electronic database that contained all of the Holmes stories and then search for the phrase. Essentially, this is how a corpus can help you.
