Acknowledgements

COSER would not be here without the help of the 30+ generations of students who have participated in field trips since the 1989-1990 academic year. These students have studied, transcribed and analysed COSER recordings for their coursework and I am particularly grateful to the ones who have returned one, twice, four or more times, out of a pure interest in dialectology. In doing so, they have ensured our surveys' success by accompanying the new "novice" students, or volunteers from other campaigns (not as a part of fieldwork) during the summer and as part of research projects. All their names appear in the list of survey campaigns and in the available files.

Students and collaborators
Above all, I must mention a group of former UAM students who have been particularly active in COSER's work as collaborators. In this list, I include those who transcribed recordings for the first research projects, in particular José Ignacio Sanjuán Astigarraga and María José González Arévalo (1991-1993, 1994-1995). Javier Rodríguez Molina also received a Collaboration Grant during the 2001-2002 academic year and, thanks to this funding, we were able to create a database with all the information concerning COSER (archive information, interviewers, informants, surveyed sites, dates, duration of the recordings, etc.). He also created the first general map of COSER, showing all the localities where we had interviewed so far. Cristina García Sánchez worked as a grant holder for the Teaching Innovation Project "Audible Archive of Spoken Spanish" ["Archivo sonoro de español hablado"] (2003), digitalising 290 hours of COSER recordings and preparing the first sound archives for this website, as well as creating a database with information regarding the transcriptions. Enrique Pato, as Contracted Research Staff under the project "Dialect Syntax of Peninsular Spanish" ["Sintaxis dialectal del español peninsular"] during 2004, was in charge of finalising the first version of this website, preparing many of its files (updating and revising the general map, creating the provincial maps and campaign lists, and transcribing and selecting sound samples), as well as reviewing all the others. From 2010 to 2014, Carlota de Benito Moreno and Víctor Lara Bermejo, as pre-doctoral fellows, collaborated in a decisive way in the projects "Variation and Change in Syntax in Peninsular Spanish" ["Variación y cambio en la sintaxis del español peninsular"] (2010-2012) and "Processes of change in the Syntax of Peninsular Spanish" ["Procesos de cambio en la sintaxis del español peninsular"] (2013-2015), while preparing their theses on aspects of syntactic variation. The improvements made to COSER in recent years are largely down to their organisational skills, hard work and enthusiasm. Over the past decade, Beatriz Martín Izquierdo (2011-2014, 2016-2017), Sara García Motilla (2011), Ana Estrada Arráez (2013-2014), Piedad Puchades Muñoz (2015), Gema Herranz Martínez (2016) and Isabel-Clara Muñoz Briongos (2018) have also worked at COSER with unwavering dedication as part-time contract transcription editors. In the past five years, Olga León Zurdo (2015-2017), Gema Herranz Martínez (2016-2020), Jorge Agulló González (2017-), Isabel-Clara Muñoz Briongos (2021-) have also joined the team as pre-doctoral contract researchers, and Alba Aires Salvador (2018-2020) and Roxana Denisa Marica (2020-) as Research Assistants. From the University of Salamanca, Borja Alonso Pascua (2019) has worked hard to increase the corpus.

Computer development
Since 2010, COSER transcriptions have benefited from the BConcord editor, developed especially by Bautista Horcajada, Professor at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. This software allows us to edit the materials with a system of standardised markings and combine text and sound. The digitalisation of all the materials and their organisation
into a computer-structured corpus was also made possible thanks to the advice provided by Bautista Horcajada, who really deserves his own section in these acknowledgements. The tools he has developed have allowed us to take a giant step forward in the processing of the material and making them available to researchers.

Thanks to the help of CSIC Senior Scientist Javier Pueyo Mena, since 2016 the previously-developed editor has been adapted to an online editing system, which allows centralised transcription with different user and access permissions. In addition, Javier Pueyo has adapted the set of Freeling libraries to the characteristics of an oral corpus,
which has facilitated the development of the Advanced Search option. This Search option allows researchers to use the corpus in a complex way through morphosyntactic tags and lemmas and, since 2020, it has even been possible to download results in Excel, with the geographical coordinates and postcode of the localities. Thanks to the generosity of Professor Hiroto Ueda from the University of Tokyo, COSER transcriptions can be accessed using the LYNEAL programme, which allows for form comparison and mapping functions that are not offered by the Basic Search nor the Advanced Search. Javier Pueyo, in 2018, and Álvaro Bueno, in 2021, worked on the automatic synchronisation of sound materials with textual transcriptions, which has made it possible to retrieve the sound fragment together with the searched textual sequence in the Advanced Search option. The project "A Respeaking and Collaborative Game-Based Approach to Building a Parsed Corpus of European Spanish Dialects" (FWO Medium-scale research infrastructure project, Grant Number I000418N), of which Professor Miriam Bouzouita is principal researcher, has subsidised part of this synchronisation and is developing a syntactic analyser based on the COSER corpus. This is the subject of Johnatan Bonilla’s doctoral thesis at Ghent University.

In 2021, the COSER was made available for download in open access, both in txt and xml tagged format.

Colleagues
I must also thank here all those colleagues who, in one way or another, have recognised or supported COSER and the work that goes into this project. I am particularly grateful to my colleagues from the Department of Spanish at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and in particular those who form or have formed part of the projects related to COSER (Diego Catalán, Javier Elvira, Marina Fernández, Javier García, Juan Ramón Lodares, Azucena Palacios, José Portolés, Ana Serradilla, Santiago U. Sánchez, Jacinto González Cobas), as well as the former coordinator of the Audiovisual and Multimedia Resources Unit (María Luisa Ortega) and Álvaro Ortigosa (Advanced IT School). The support given by the university's Director of Research Infrastructures, Ángel Muñoz Martín, has also been pivotal for COSER and facilitated its hosting on a server at the Scientific Computing Centre (Centro de Computación Científica). Colleagues from other universities provided technical advice on various issues, such as the digitalisation of files (José Manuel Blecua, Joaquim Llisterri and Eduardo Uriós, (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona), the creation of maps with Geographic Information Systems (Ignacio Zabala, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and the statistical analysis of data (María José Medrano, Instituto de Salud Carlos III, Pilar Guzmán, UAM).

Within Spain, the following academics have been directly involved in COSER: Cristina Matute (Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus), Daniel Sáez, Edita Gutiérrez and Raquel González Rodríguez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Araceli López Serena, Lola Pons (Universidad de Sevilla), Bruno Camus (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha), Andrés Enrique-Arias and Ruth Miguel Franco (Universitat de les Illes Balears). Abroad, COSER has received support and interests from David Heap (University of Western Ontario, Canada), Flora Klein-Andreu (State University of New York, United States of America), Iván Ortega-Santos (University of Memphis, USA), Pilar Larrañaga (University of Wuppertal, Germany), Mónica Castillo Lluch, Elena Díez del Corral Areta and Cristina Peña Rueda (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Álvaro Octavio de Toledo y Huerta (University of Munich, Germany, and UAM), Miriam Bouzouita (University of Ghent, Belgium, and University of Berlin, Germany), Irene Salvo García (CNRS, Lyon, France, and UAM) and Paul O'Neill (University of Sheffield, UK).

A separate and very important addition to these acknowledgements is dedicated to my former undergraduate students, doctoral students and now university professors, who continue to collaborate in the surveys, the development of the corpus and the obtaining of funding: Carlota de Benito (University of Zurich), Ana Estrada (Université de Liège and Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Enrique Pato (University of Montreal).

The surveys conducted of the Canary Islands (2016-2019) and Mallorca (2017) were made possible thanks to the generous funding and time granted by Miriam Bouzouita, Mónica Castillo Lluch and Andrés Enrique-Arias, who not only obtained funding for their implementation, but also involved their own students and research groups.

Finally, speakers and professors of other Iberian languages lent their support in improving the transcription of bilingual speakers. Of these I must give a special mention to Maria Pilar Perea Sabater, from the University of Barcelona, who has revised many fragments in Catalan.

Institutional support
The Universidad Autónoma de Madrid must take pride of place in this section acknowledging funding, since their support has enabled the dialectology field trips on which many of COSER's materials have been collected. The UAM has also supported COSER in other ways. Firstly, through the granting of three projects: a research project for Pre-competitive Groups (1991-1993) and two others for Teaching Innovation (2003, 2004-2005). The first made it possible to organise the survey campaigns of the summers of 1991, 1992 and 1993, as well as the transcription to text files of some of the materials collected. The second made it possible to undertake an initial digitisation of 290 hours of recordings and to produce the first version of this website (2005-2015). The digitisation and Internet access work continued throughout the 2004-2005 academic year, thanks to the third of the above-mentioned projects, at the UAM’s Audiovisual and Multimedia Resources Unit (URAM). The UAM's Computer Linguistics Laboratory has also hosted the project's website since 2015 and, finally, the UAM's Scientific Computing Centre set up a server to host the database and the online editor.

COSER has also received support from other entities: the Autonomous Community of Madrid approved a research project to continue transcribing recorded materials (1994-1995), and the Ministry of Science and Technology subsidised, as part of the project “Dialect Syntax of Peninsular Spanish” ["Sintaxis dialectal del español peninsular"], the computerisation of some of the transcriptions and the unitary revision of the transcriptions (2004).The "Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture du Québec" (FQRSC) of the Quebec Ministry of Education (Canada) and the "Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada" have also contributed to the revision of the COSER transcriptions thanks to the projects "Corpus de la syntaxe dialectale de l'espagnol péninsulaire" (2007-2010) and "Syntaxe dialectale de l'espagnol" (May 2010-May 2013), directed by Enrique Pato. In 2013, the digitisation of all the materials and the revision of 150 hours of transcriptions, representative of all the provinces contained in the COSER, was completed thanks to the research project “Variation and Change in Syntax in Peninsular Spanish” ["Variación y cambio en la sintaxis del español peninsular"] (2010-2012), subsidised by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, with which the project was integrated into the European network EDISYN (European Dialect Syntax), coordinated by the Dutch professor Sief Barbiers. A Complementary Action of the Ministry of Science "Campaña final de encuestas para el Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural" (2012-2013) made possible four extraordinary surveys to complete the sample of recordings in Andalusia, Murcia and Levante.

As part of reasearch project "Processes of change in the Syntax of Peninsular Spanish" ["Procesos de cambio en la sintaxis del español peninsular"] (2013-2015), funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the transcriptions were increased with 21 interviews, the design of this website was updated, and a search engine (Basic Search) was developed that allows the transcriptions to be interrogated and the results to be mapped. As part of the activities foreseen in the Excellence "New Resources for the Study of Dialect Variation in Spanish" ["Nuevos recursos para el estudio de la variación dialectal del español] (2015-2017), also funded by this Ministry, 26 hours were added to the transcriptions available in the corpus and in the tagging of the main aspects of grammatical variation that these materials offer. The project "Grammatical Change in European Spanish: theoretical issues and Empirical advances" ["Cambio gramatical en el español europeo: problemas teóricos y avances empíricos"] (2016-2018), funded by the same Ministry, allowed us to make further progress in the transcription of the materials (24 hours of recording) and, above all, made them more accessible. Thus, after adapting the set of Freeling libraries, the corpus was labelled and lemmatised, and a search engine was developed to enable complex analysis of the materials (Advanced Search), with mapping and the ability to download materials in Excel. Finally, as part of the project "Changes in Rural Speech from 20th (Linguistic Atlas of the Iberian Peninsula, ALPI) to the 21st century (Audible Corpus of Rural Spoken Spanish)" [“Cambios en el habla rural: del siglo XX (Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica, ALPI) al siglo XXI (Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural, COSER)”], funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, work has continued on the number of transcriptions on the website. Thanks to these efforts, 28 transcriptions were added between 2019 and 2021, and those already available have been corrected (46 have undergone an in-depth revision). The automatic synchronisation of 114 localities has also been checked (in which there were errors of varying degrees).