New methods for the study of grammatical variation and the "Audible Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish"

Resumen

The Audible Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish (or COSER after its Spanish abbreviation) is a corpus of oral interviews which aims to study dialect grammar in the Iberian Peninsula. In this paper COSER characteristics and methodology are described and compared to atlases regards the research of dialect grammar. Thanks to COSER, a number of Spanish dialect syntax issues which were partially known or fully ignored have been researched, the geographical distribution of these features has been sometimes considerably broadened, and traditional explanations have been replaced by new ones based on a better knowledge of the data. Thus, the index of grammar phenomena deserving further research has been enlarged. In addition, grammar variation phenomena have showed new areal configurations in Spanish dialectology, and moreover, the study of dialect grammar has also revealed itself as an important source for a better understanding of many cross-linguistic principles.