doi:10.1017/S1360674307002249 Printed in the United Kingdom Special issue on English dialect syntax Edited by

Preface by the guest editors This special volume is concerned with the syntax of nonstandard varieties of (mainly British) English, and how such syntactic variation is accounted for within a range of theoretical models. There has been a growing interest in the modelling of dialect syntax (a) in a number of languages and (b) in a number of syntactic theories (see, for instance, the research on syntactic microvariation in some Germanic languages in Barbiers, Cornips & van der Kelij, 2002, or the construction-based approach to variation in Leino & Östman, 2005). We have brought together five articles written in different theoretical frameworks (Principles and Parameters, Stochastic Optimality Theory, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Word Grammar, and Construction Grammar), together with an introduction written by the editors, who themselves adopt very different theoretical frameworks. The articles in this special issue present new theoretical research into grammatical variation in English, which yields a number of findings of interest to those involved in work in English dialectology, typology, and syntactic theory. While all of the article