Introduction

In the past decade or so the authors have been involved with a large project relating to the morpho-syntax of dialects comprising Italy, Corsica, and the Italian and Romansch-speaking areas of Switzerland. This was born of an overarching concern with the nature of parametrization, and in particular with its microparametric dimension, with respect to which so-called dialects represent the ideal case study. As both our coverage of the data and our understanding of the problems involved in their analysis deepened, we found ourselves with a rather different work from what we may have originally envisaged, since it embedded of necessity some important revisions of current theories relating in particular to the syntax-morphology interface.