Searching for grammatical patterns

[DrWatson]

When I'm trying to understand how to use a 成语 or a certain vocabulary term, I often turn to baidu or some search engine to find usage examples. Does anyone have any suggests for trying to find usage examples of grammatical patterns?

For example, I'm trying to learn more about the 從...中 pattern. Is there a search engine trick to perform a search on those two characters with any text in between (like a regular expression)? Or is there an online dictionary of grammatical patterns?

[edelweis]

google 從*中 (as someone explained on the board previously... can't remember who)

[c_redman]

Use this interface (Univ. of Leeds). As an example, a query like "从 . . . . . . . . 中", will match any phrases with up to 8 intervening words.

Be wary of Google's wildcard search with Chinese. It looks like their back end segments words, and the wildcard only works between words, not within a single word. Thus, if you are searching for "一丘之*" to find the chengyu 一丘之貉 (jackals of the same tribe/They are all just as bad as each other), for example, the top hits are 一丘之骆 (all a pack of camels?), 一丘之貂 (martens of a feather? Or, a wrong similar character?), and lots of apparent typos. The correct, common chengyu doesn't even appear in the list.