research methodology

[Arnold Zwicky]

sali mufwene refers me to studies on grammaticality judgments.
i know these well, and i myself have used questionnaires (on
fairly large numbers of subjects) to ferret out systems of idiolects.
my question, however, had to do with getting at relatively rare
systems.  i'm especially interested in hearing from people who've
used corpus searches (or very large questionnaire studies) to find
individuals with particularly interesting varieties and then
following up with them.  there are practical and ethical issues
here.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)