Within only 20 years, a large proportion of scholars in this area appear to have moved their focus from the detailed study of medieval morphosyntax (with very few excursions into other periods) to the tracing of and analysis of holochronic trajectories (evolutionary curves) of their chosen linguistic phenomena. In a branch of linguistics so dependent upon the bulk of data, this step change in available tools has brought with it a considerable reassessment of its objectives (cf. A strong indication of CORDE’s influence can be found in the 36 studies of morphosyntax in the most recent AHLE (Cádiz, 2012, proceedings from 2015), of which only a quarter (9/36) were completed without access to an electronic corpus, while over half (19/36) used data mined from CORDE 5.
Despite these shortcomings, CORDE represents -as stated by Guillermo Rojo, its main promoter- an “instrumental revolution” ( Rojo, 2012: 433–434) that has transformed the discipline of historical linguistics at its foundations, i.e., from the access to data itself.
There are also issues concerning how texts are dated (the date is fixed according to the original composition rather than the date of the much later manuscripts upon which the versions in the corpus are often based), the searchability of the database itself (an especially important consideration for syntactic searches), and the distribution of the texts by historical period (with some periods being far better represented than others) 4. It has been noted, for example, that there is a lack of philological quality in some of the texts available. CORDE offers many pit-falls for the researcher, and not just those of the type which Eberenz outlines. The Diachronic Corpus of Spanish (CORDE 3) is by far the digital corpus that has had most impact on the discipline, as Table 1 suggests, since the major leap upward in the trend for holochronic studies coincides with the granting of general access to this corpus at the beginning of this century. However, the plethora of information stored on computer brings with it a certain danger, that is, the data tend to become a shapeless mass in which the differences between texts and within individual texts become lost from view. The digital corpus and the tools provided by information technology permit both statistical and linguistic analysis of increasing precision. We have at our disposal a body of texts, the majority of which are “literary,” from which we select two or three works for each century to extract the data that interests us. A few years ago, Rolf Eberenz made a timely observation on both these trends, adding a warning concerning the implications of both: This parallel and complementary change in focus may have numerous causes, of which two are, in my opinion, clearly prevailing: a growing tendency to carry out (and, what is more, accept the validity of) studies dealing with very long timescales based on very few sources for the individual historical periods studied – these sources being considered representative due to their iconic literary or cultural status – and, above all, the increasing ease of access to large databases of digitized resources. From Table 1 two important conclusions are easily drawn: first, the body of work dedicated exclusively to the study of medieval Spanish has been diminishing at a steady rate and secondly, in contrast, those works seeking to capture the complete historical evolution of the language ( holochronic studies) have increased dramatically in frequency – the largest increase occurring around the time of the 6th Conference (Madrid, 2003).
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