Table of contents -- List of contributors -- Universals and variation: an introduction -- Part 1 Varieties and cross-linguistic variation -- Causal clauses: a cross-linguistic investigation of their structure, meaning, and use -- Two euroversals in a global perspective: auxiliation and alignment -- The diachronic development of article-possessor complementarity in the history of Italian and Portuguese -- Variation as a window on universals -- Part 2 Contact-induced variation -- Gender and contact - a Natural Morphology perspective on Scandinavian examples -- Universals of structural borrowing -- Part 3 Methodological issues of variation research -- Variation and reproducibility in linguistics -- Parameters of morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes: prospects and limitations of searching for universals -- Comparing varieties of English: problems and perspectives -- Part 4 Variation and linguistic theory -- Norwegian main clause declaratives: variation within and across grammars -- Syntactic variation and change in Romance: a Minimalist approach -- A localistic approach to universals and variation -- Lexicon, phonology and phonetics. Or: rule-based and usage-based approaches to phonological variation -- Index.