Edited by author 03-16-2003 08:13 AM
Goodness... finally a topic I know a bit about.

Analysis of a text like this is called 'concordancing'. It's very popular in my field, language teaching, because it can show you how language actually behaves, rather than how you think it behaves or how a book of grammar says it should behave.

This is an example of such a service:
http://titania.cobuild.collins.co.uk/form.html
(but I really really want Google to come along and show them how it's done)

Try this search term: officials+VBD

Basically, once you have a few simple tools and you know that your corpus is representative, it's easy to discover all sorts of fascinating things about language.