For example, Merlo and Stevenson (1998) show that, contrary to the naive assumption, speakers' preferences in syntactic disambiguation are not simply directly related to frequency (i.e., a speaker's preference for one construction over another is not simply modelled by the frequency of the construction, or of the words in the construction).
the kind of corpus investigation we are advocating--founded on in-depth linguistic analysis--holds promise for building more natural NLP systems which go beyond the simplest assumptions, and tie together statistical computational linguistic results with experimental psycholinguistic data.