Using a robust and accurate wide-coverage parser, large syntactically annotated corpora can be constructed easily. In this talk, we will review a number of application areas where such corpora for Dutch have been found useful: to study the distribution of certain syntactic constructions (i.e. word order in indirect object constructions, the distribution of focus particles inside PPs, (alleged) extraction of PPs from NPs, etc.), to acquire lexical and ontological information (ranging from support verb constructions to definition sentences), and for relation extraction and question answering.

An issue in all applications is the development of tools for searching, extracting, and combining information from treebanks stored in XML. Recently, we have started to use XQuery, a generic XML query language based on XPath, for a such tasks. An interesting feature of the language is the module system, which allows the definition of treebank-specific functions that can be used to support advanced extraction tasks.