ABSTRACT The syntax of a very large number of Romance languages from France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland will be studied with the aim of elucidating the primitives of syntactic variation. Data will be accumulated from written sources and from native speaker judgments, and an attempt made to bring to light significant clusterings of syntactic properties. It is expected that comparison of a great many very closely related languages should facilitate the discovery of syntactic parameters, and simultaneously provide unique evidence bearing on the universal syntactic principles postulated to interact with such parameters. The areas of syntax to be emphasized will include: clitics, infinitives, participles, complementizers, reflexives, imperatives, quantifiers, adverbs, agreement, causatives, control and auxiliaries. The hypothesis that syntact variation can be reduced to a relatively small number of parameters will be tested, as will hypotheses concerning the form of such parameters. Results concerning such parameters will bear in important ways on questions of syntax acquisition and on questions of syntact change.
