Abstract
In this talk, I will explore how the diachronic and synchronic variation documented by Romance languages, and in particular by their dialectal varieties, offers us an unparalleled harvest of linguistic data (often of a typologically exotic nature), likely to be of interest not only to theoretical linguists and specialists in Romance linguistics, but also to the general public. This still fertile, yet under-exploited, field of study has a central role to play in challenging linguistic orthodoxies and in shaping and building new perspectives on language change, structure and variation. This is an area that should be at the forefront of linguistic research and accessible to the wider language community.
At the same time, a grasp of the issues at stake in the current theoretical debate is essential if we are to better understand the structures and patterns borrowed in the Romance linguistic space. This is all the more true when it comes to stages of linguistic history that are known only through texts from earlier periods, where native speakers are not available to provide judgments on grammaticality and thus fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle.
