Synchronic corpora of Spanish. Description and potentialities for theoretical and applied language research

At present, there are several synchronic Spanish corpora, which are linguistic resources of great value for empirical studies on Spanish, for developing both research on language, and language teaching and learning strategies. The aims of this article are: 1) to register and describe the main synchronic Spanish corpora available; 2) to identify the utilities of these corpora for theoretical and applied research on Spanish language; 3) to systematise a repertoire of some of the most studied linguistic phenomena on the basis of these resources. The analysis is based on the systematic review of 60 papers published in the last ten years (2011-2021). The findings suggest that, given the extension, topicality and samples of spoken and written native Spanish varieties, general and specialised corpora are powerful and complementary resources for theoretical and applied research on Spanish language. In this regard, it’s striking that these resources are widely used in Spanish Peninsular variety research and teaching contexts. However, recent theoretical or applied research referring to Spanish American varieties have not been found to the same extent.