sentences: Information technology should have much to offer linguistics, not only through the opportunities offered by large-scale data analysis and the stimulus to develop formal computational models, but through the chance to use language in systems for automatic natural language processing. The paper discusses these possibilities in detail, and then examines the actual work that has been done. It is evident that this has so far been primarily research within a new field, computational linguistics, which is largely motivated by the demands, and interest, of practical processing systems, and that information technology has had rather little influence on linguistics at large. There are different reasons for this, and not all good ones: information technology deserves more attention from linguists.