This book describes an important tool for the storage and exploration of syntactic structures that may be used under VAX/VMS, UNIX, and MS/PC-DOS in both interactive and batch modes. Linguistic DataBase, developed by the authors within the TOSCA Group at the University of Nijmegen, retrieves, displays, and counts constituent structures from syntactic trees. The book cover shows why LDB is original: magnifying glass, hovering over book opened to two pages of text, shows an inverted seven-level tree, root at the top, leaves corresponding to the words in sentence at the bottom. Hans van Halteren and Theo van den Heuvel of the TOSCA group have created primary tool for corpus linguistics: generic displayer of syntactic trees from diverse databases with different encoding schemes.LDB and its manual give students of language use --- including teachers of English as second language, computational linguists, researchers of style in literature, and language historians --- common retrieval system for syntactic phenomena. Interactive concordance programs retrieve words and their tags from sizable texts and corpora. Such tags sometimes encode morphological, part-of-speech, and even functional information. Yet these tools cannot conveniently retrieve any word or word group that satisfies pattern of syntactic tags, let alone display the results of an inquiry as tree.The authors also describe the LDB as a model of database appropriate to corpus-linguistic setting (p. 3). Their manual outlines the current range of possibilities in syntactic corpus research, and LDB exemplifies the kind of editorial capabilities, displays, and file management facilities that working database management system for syntactic trees should have. The book also tests both the function-category description model developed by F. Aarts and J. Aarts in 1982 and the contemporary English grammar published by Randolph Quirk and others ten years earlier. Both are important contributions to corpus linguistics.