Sinclair's seminal work - the bible of corpus linguistics In this post I would like to defend linguistic corpora and their relevance to the ELT field which Hugh Dellar raises doubts about. Years ago before I became familiar with corpus tools (corpus as in linguistic corpus = "collection of samples of real-world texts stored on computer"; plural = corpora) we had a fierce debate with my colleagues whether to use the preposition to or for after the noun hint . We wanted to produce posters for English learning centres we had set up for a number of high schools and each poster was meant to provide "Hints for/to speaking / listening etc". Emails were sent back and forth about what preposition should be used and the argument inevitably turned to the British/American distinction until somebody used Google Fight to compare hints to and hints for . Google Fight provided us with pseudo-scientific evidence that hints for is slightly more common than hints to – it was ba...