Aims to investigate and attain new insights on how and to what extent the wider sociolinguistic context of language use and contact impinges on formal grammatical structures. This book approaches the problem from various points of view by focusing on language evolution and change, on multilingualism, language mixing and dialect variation.

1. Introduction: Language variation, contact, and change in grammar and sociolinguistics (by Afarli, Tor A.); 2. Language ecology, language evolution, and the actuation question (by Mufwene, Salikoko S.); 3. Syntactic change: Between universal grammar and fuzzy grammar (by Newmeyer, Frederick J.); 4. Language contact, linguistic variability and the construction of local identities (by Cornips, Leonie M.E.A.); 5. The social side of syntax in multilingual Oslo (by Nistov, Ingvild); 6. The expansion of the Preterit in Rioplatenese Spanish: Contact induced? (by Flogstad, Guro); 7. Constructing diasystems: Grammatical organisation in bilingual groups (by Hoder, Steffen); 8. Syntactic frames and single-word code-switching: A case study of Mandarin Chinese - Norwegian bilingualism (by Afarli, Tor A.); 9. Norwegian discourse ellipses in the left periphery - interacting structural and semantic restrictions (by Nygard, Mari); 10. The myth of creole "exceptionalism" (by Bickerton, Derek); 11. Some notes on bare noun phrases in Haitian Creole and Gungbe: A transatlantic Sprachbund perspective (by Aboh, Enoch O.); 12. Coding in time: On the historical character of linguistic knowledge (by Gregersen, Frans); 13. Index