Descrizione grammaticale e variazione linguistica: il caso della dialettologia storica

In this article I discuss the role of dialectal variation in the description of languages of the past. Taking into consideration the methodological problems faced by the project GraVO, Grammatica del veneto delle Origini (‘A grammar of Old Venetan’), I argue that the inclusion in the corpus of texts coming from different areas can be an advantage, because the analysis of the expected dialectal variation allows us to reach a better definition of the different varieties and a more fine-grained description of their grammars. The discussion is based on three different morphosyntactic phenomena: negative concord, expletive subjects and lexical prepositions.