ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses particularly on three areas: the frequency of grammatical features, examples of insights from corpus-based descriptions of grammatical features, and the relationship between grammar and lexis. It reviews some of the corpus-based descriptive findings in relation to grammar to illustrate how corpus research can shed new light on grammatical features. The descriptive and probabilistic rules which often emerges from corpus research to cast doubt on the veracity of deterministic rules can, then, be unsettling for those attached to a straightforward correct/incorrect dichotomy in relation to grammar.The corpus research has led to fuller descriptions of certain grammatical features which sometimes challenge traditional pedagogical descriptions. The next god of the grammatical pantheon to be slain by corpus linguists is the pedagogic treatment of conditionals,which has come under fire on the grounds that the rules traditionally presented in ELT materials are a considerable over-simplification, if not misrepresentation of reality. Corpus evidence poses frequency-related questions about the grammatical items and priority accorded.
