Introduction: language variation, contact, and change in grammar and sociolinguistics / Tor A. Åfarli & Brit Mæhlum -- Language ecology, language evolution and the actuation question / Salikoko S. Mufwene -- Syntactic change: Between Universal Grammar and Fuzzy Grammar / Frederick J. Newmeyer -- Language contact, linguistic variability and the construction of local identities / Leonie Cornips -- The social side of syntax in multilingual Oslo / Ingvild Nistov & Toril Opsah -- The expansion of the preterit in Rioplatenese Spanish: Contact induced? / Guro Fløgstad -- Constructing diasystems: grammatical organisation in bilingual groups / Steffen Höder -- Syntactic frames and single-word code-switching: A case study of Mandarin Chinese - Norwegian bilingualism / Tor A. Åfarli & Fufen Jin -- -- Norwegian discourse ellipses in the left periphery: interacting structural and semantic restrictions / Mari Nygård -- The myth of Creole "exceptionalism" / Derek Bickerton -- Some notes on bare noun phrases in Haitian Creole and Gùngbè: A transatlantic Sprachbund perspective / Enoch Aboh & Michel DeGraff -- Coding in time: On the historical character of linguistic knowledge / Frans Gregersen.