Against the background of some of the major linguistic problems which demand our attention and which should point to some badly-needed criteria, the brief history and structure of the Czech National Corpus is outlined. The points seen as open include differences between various languages in their degree of ex-plicitness, form-function relation, ellipsis, etc. It is argued that a more general and language-independent approach is necessary to handle, among other things, the multi-word units of the text; a general corpus maintenance and query system available to the increasing number of would-be users is required, too. The particular Czech solution, still being worked out and gradually implemented, is described in some detail.