ABSTRACT
Throughout the long history of comparative Romance linguistics, the study of Spanish has played an important role in our understanding of both the relevant phenomena that characterize this family of languages and the mechanisms of variation and change that gave rise to them. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the trajectory of comparative Romance linguistics, focusing specifically on the development of methodological perspectives. Our goal 464is twofold: to situate the study of Spanish with respect to the set of topics, both traditional and innovative, that have come to characterize this field and to demonstrate how the use of corpora, particularly those that include Spanish, have taken a primary role in the effort to understand cross-linguistic patterns. After a review of the relevant background literature, we offer an overview of the current state of affairs concerning the use of corpora in studies that involve Spanish, with special attention on a case study involving forms of past reference. From there, we survey the use of parallel and comparable corpora in comparative Romance linguistics, providing a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of each and offering an additional case study involving the behavior of intensifiers in Spanish and Portuguese. We conclude in Section 5 with a description of current and forthcoming developments in the application of corpus methods in comparative Romance linguistics, along with comments concerning what remains to be done within the field of comparative analysis.
