Five of the contributions (Adger & Smith, Barbiers, Cheshire, Gervain and Zemplén as well as Henry) arose from invited presentations at the workshop on Syntactic Variation organised by the editors of the present volume that was held in June 2003 during the Second International Conference On Language Variation In Europe (ICLaVE 2) at the University of Uppsala. The primary aim of this workshop was to initiate cooperation between internationally renowned generative and variationist linguists with a view to developing an innovative and more cohesive approach to syntactic variation.