Before beginning the Serbocroatian-English Contrastive Project, it was necessary to determine whether to base the analysis on a corpus or on native intuitions. It seemed that the best method would combine the theoretical and the empirical. A translation method based on a corpus of text was adopted. The Brown University "Standard Sample of Present-Day Edited American English," translated into Serbocroatian, became the basis of the corpus. Several contrastive projects were studied; each used a corpus either from the beginning or during the course of the work. Several examples from the work of the Serbocroatian-English project illustrate the need for a corpus in contrastive analysis. Analysts writing preliminary reports counted on the corpus to illustrate and check findings. If findings are to be applied to teaching, a representative corpus offers better and more versatile material. A corpus cannot replace theory, but no contrastive project is complete unless verified by a corpus. Only a corpus can verify doubtful grammar, assess frequency and distribution of forms, illustrate stylistic values and provide an exhaustive listing of items for contrastive analysis and its application. (CHK)