Syntactic microvariation in Catalan. The Microvariació.cat initiative

In this paper we present the Microvariació.cat initiative (www.microvariacio.cat), whose main goal is to identify, compile and systematically organise all the research done regarding Catalan syntax in order to design a website available to specialists and the general public. We reflect on the value of investigating the syntactic variation of languages and we prove how the Microvariació.cat initiative is the starting point for a major challenging study on the microsyntax of Catalan. We characterise the different aspects of the initiative and we describe the methodology followed to build up a database integrated by an exhaustive list of Catalan microvariation phenomena and a set of reference works on the different topics and areas listed.