The book presents a selection of papers on syntactic variation from different theoretical and methodological points of view. As such, it contributes to a process of reflection on the dialectical relationship between theoretical explanation and empirical description. In the first part, the authors discuss the use of corpora in syntactic variation studies. The rest of the book presents some new approaches to a number of controversial topics. Part Two concentrates on word order, information structure, and its phonological realization, while Part Three enlarges on variations in the encoding of syntactic relations.