The Gsearch system allows the selection of sentences by syntacticcriteria from text corpora, even when these corpora contain no priorsyntactic markup. This is achieved by means of a fast chart parser,which takes as input a grammar and a search expression specified by theuser. Gsearch features a modular architecture that can be extendedstraightforwardly to give access to new corpora. The Gsearcharchitecture also allows interfacing with external linguistic resources(such as taggers and lexical databases). Gsearch can be used withgraphical tools for visualizing the results of a query.