This volume is concerned with a linguistic level that has only become a growing area of research interest during the past decades. As traditional foci have posed multiple questions concerning the approach of syntactic variation, further research is required to base the appropriate answers to these questions on solid empirical foundations. The common element of the nine contributions in this volume is, however, not solely based on the focus on syntactical issues, but also on their shared views on the types of syntactic variation focused, namely on the perspective of areal linguistics, which poses questions of a complex correlation between language and space in its geographical dimension.
