The forests behind the trees

Syntactic databases are increasingly available and are put to a variety of uses, including serving as organized reference material for descriptive and theoretical syntacticians. Dense databases recording fine variation within a single language area, so-called "microvariation'', play a prominent role with respect to this use. In addition the large collections allow syntactic variation to be studied quantitatively in dialectology and in the analysis of second-language, pidgin and creole varieties. The large collections enable exploratory, "data-mining'' approaches, and are well positioned to detect statistical tendencies that may be imperfect, and therefore not universal. Finally, some researchers have hypothesized that syntactic features may be more stable over long periods of time than lexical or phonetic features and are investigating whether syntactic structure bears a signal of historical relatedness. This work too requires quantitative analysis that is only possible with large, systematic collections. This article introduces a special issue of Lingua devoted to presenting and exploring research using large syntactic databases. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.