Drawing on a number of corpus studies, including a considerable amount of data taken from my own corpora of textual and fieldwork studies on the dialects of Italy, I shall explore, in a manner which is accessible to both general scholars of the Romance languages and linguists, how the richly documented diachronic and synchronic variation exhibited by the Romance languages, and especially their dialectal varieties, offers an unparalleled wealth of linguistic data (often of a typologically exotic

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... nature) of interest not just to Romance linguists, but also to general linguists. This perennially fertile and still under-utilized testing ground, I will show, has a central role to play in challenging linguistic orthodoxies and shaping and informing new ideas and perspectives about language change, structure and variation, and should therefore be at the forefront of linguistic research and accessible to the wider linguistic community. At the same time, a familiarity with current key ideas and assumptions in theoretical linguistics has an important role to play in understanding the structures and patterns of Romance, and, in particular, those known to us only through the texts of earlier periods where native speakers are not available to provide crucial grammaticality judgments and fill in the missing empirical pieces of the relevant puzzle. Following a brief introduction in §1 to linguistic variation across Romance in relation to parameters, universals and language typology, I shall then explore in §2 some case studies of microvariation across Romance which highlight what Romance can do for syntactic theory by way of testing, challenging and expanding our theory of language and the empirical base. By the same token, the tools and insights of current theories of A. LEDGEWAY [1] a *your brother, [ CP to whom [ IP I wonder [ CP which lies [ IP they told to whom]]]] (Eng.) b tuo fratello, [ CP a cui [ IP mi domando [ CP che bugie [ IP abbiano raccontato a cui]]]] (It.