Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell 8 ing of Chomskyan methodological priorities. Advances in computer technology and the availability of powerful and relatively inexpensive desktop machines have acted as a catalyst for this revival. This area of lin- guistics, called corpus linguistics due to the central role of machine read- able corpora of real language serving as the databases for grammatical study 25, is in many ways ideally suited to the study of the Greek of the New Testament. In most forms of contemporary linguistic analysis, judgments are made on the basis of the intuitions of native speakers regarding the grammaticality of utterances. For the study of the Greek New Testament, there are no native speakers of the language available to verify the grammaticality of constructed sentences, so one must rely upon the corpus of available texts. In addition, the New Testament cor- pus with grammatical (part-of-speech) annotation is available in ma- chine readable form with a number of software tools to access it, such as the GRAMCORD and BibleWorks programs. The grammarian of the Greek New Testament is now able quickly to compile results from searches for numerous combinations of words and grammatical constructions. This presents exciting options for future grammatical work, but it also has potential pitfalls, with the real danger of an increase in the number of unstructured numerical studies that lack a theoretical grounding 26. The ability to collect and collate vast amounts of linguistic data means lit- tle without a theoretical framework in which these results can be evaluated 27. Attempts to apply syntactical theories, such as various forms of Chomskyan derived grammar, to the Greek of the New Testament have achieved only modest success 28. However, a number of recent studies applying models of 25 On the history and theoretical basis of corpus linguistics, see G. Leech, «The State of the Art in Corpus Linguistics», in K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg (eds.), English Corpus Linguistics: Studies in Honour of Jan Svartvik (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 8-29; J. Svartvik, «Corpus Linguistics Comes of Age», in Svartvik (ed.), Directions in Corpus Linguistics, pp. 7-13. 26 On the use of annotated corpora for the study of the Greek of the New Testament, see M.B. O’Donnell, «The Use of Annotated Corpora for New Testament Discourse Analysis: A Survey of Current Practice and Future Prospects», in S.E. Porter and J.T. Reed, Discourse Analysis and the New Testament: Approaches and Results ( JSNTSup, 170; SNTG, 4; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), pp. 71-117. 27 There is obviously a need for interaction between theory and data, in that the data test and, if necessary, correct the theory, while the theory provides limits and structure to the collection of data. There can be no such thing as an entirely inductive approach, one that begins with no theory, but instead aims to construct one only on the basis of the data. See K.R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963; 4th edn, 1974), esp. pp. 3-59; I. Lakatos, «Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes», in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965, volume 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 91-196, as well as other essays in this volume. 28 Examples are Schmidt, Hellenistic Greek Grammar and Noam Chomsky; R. Wonneberger, «Generative Stylistics: An Algorithmic Approach to Stylistic and Source