Atkins and Levin studied verbs in the semantic class of shake and quoted definitions from the following dictionaries:
Two of the entries which Atkins and Levin disuss are quake and quiver. Both the Longman and COBUILD dictionaries list these verbs as being instransitive, while the Oxford dictionary lists quake as being intransitive, but lists quiver as being transitive.
Looking at the occurences of these verbs in a corpus of 50,000,000 words, Atkins and Levin were able to discover examples of both quiver and quake in transitive constructions. E.g. It quaked her bowels and quivering its wings. In other words, the dictionaries had got it wrong - both verbs could be transitive as well as intransitive. This small example demonstrates how a sufficiently large and representative corpus can either supplement or refute the lexicographer's intuitions.