[urgent] natural language grammar and corpus

hello friends,

  I am student of M.Tech (or MS to say.. ) and have taken up course in
Natural Language Semantics and currently working on project
question-answering. For this purpose I am looking for a nice natural
lanuage grammar ( I don't want to go ahead of CFG or that level) can
anybody please help me in this regard....?????

and also for the same purpose I am looking for a nice corpus around
1000 lines or so which is quite good for my purpose... please
urgently, because deadline is approaching...

TIA

-Nishit