The research group ΔiaLing clusters scholars who conduct research in the field of historical and diatopic linguistics, and gives as such visibility to these fields of study. The research conducted by ΔiaLing contributes to these disciplines in the following ways:

(i) language description and documentation through the creation and dissemination of various types of descriptive tools that are of use to the linguistic community (e.g. dictionaries, grammars, corpora, text editions, databases, etc.);

(ii) the advancement of linguistic theory, which is informed by empirically-grounded studies.

A number of diverse theoretical viewpoints on language variation and change (e.g. Construction Grammar, Grammaticalization Theory, Relevance Theory, Prototype Theory, Dynamic Syntax, Cartography, Nanosyntax and, more generally, Generative Grammar) are explored for the genesis and development of a variety of phenomena. These include, among others, discourse markers and adverbs, aspect and modality, word order phenomena and information structure, transitivity alternations and valency, case-marking and argument structure, nominal constituents, adverbial clauses, negation and word formation.