In this chapter the editors introduce the book and its aim of showing how the study of comparative and historical data from the Romance languages can illuminate general linguistics. After a brief presentation of the volume and its structure, the editors reflect on how their personal experiences of working with data from the Romance languages have led them to reflect on wider issues in general ling uistics. Recurrent themes in their work have been, respectively, morphosyntactic change (Ledgeway) and sound change and its morphological consequences (Maiden). Among the topics whose theoretical implications are explored are: parametric variation, universals, typological variation, pro-drop, word order, linguistic theory and philology, complementizer systems, the interaction of phonological and morphological factors in morphologization, the problem of defining a language family, and the perils of ‘standard language bias’ in the practice of historical linguistics. While these may appear a quite heterogeneous set of issues, they are treated in a way that prompts some major shared fundamental conclusions, in particular that Romance linguistics can make its most powerful contributions to general linguistics when Romance linguists exploit to the maximum the extraordinary wealth of historical and comparative data which the Romance languages and dialects offer them.

>What is “experimental syntax”? One could reasonably argue that all syntax is experimental, in the sense that traditional syntactic research is based on series of small, informal experiments. On the other hand, one might understand “experimental syntax” to refer to psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments that focus on the structure of sentences. In practice, though, the term “experimental syntax” is generally used to refer to the intersection of these two approaches: studies that focus on the varying acceptability of sentence types and explore this by means of formal experiments. The goal of the handbook is to review what we have learned in the area of experimental syntax, but also to make sense of what this new body of knowledge is telling us, understand how experimental studies relate to the study of syntax more broadly, and explore what type of work we should be doing as the field moves forward.