In this chapter the author discusses the use of corpora in investigating structures involving NP modification in English and Hungarian. In spite of their radically different internal structure in each language, it is shown that maximally extended NPs lend themselves more easily to a comparison than parts of speech such as, for example, adjectives. Among cases that show a departure from the Adjective + Noun pattern, the author focuses on Hungarian constructions equivalent to English Noun + Prepositional Phrases. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the criteria that may be used to distinguish genuine cases of explicitation from constructions that require expansion in order to meet the requirements of grammar.