We applied data-driven methods to carry out automatic acquisition of Dutch prepositional support verb constructions (SVCs) in corpora (e.g., iets in de gaten houden (``keep an eye on something'')). This paper addresses the question whether linguistic diagnostics help to discard noise from the nbest lists and how to (semi-)automatically apply such linguistic diagnostics to parsed corpora. We show that some of the linguistic diagnostics proposed in Hollebrandse (1993) effectively identify SVCs and contribute a modest error rate decrease.