The research group Diachronic and Diatopic Linguistics (DIALING) carries out research in the field of historical and diatopic linguistics. The research contributes to these disciplines by (i) language description and documentation through the creationand dissemination of various types of descriptive tools (e.g. dictionaries, grammars, corpora, text editions, databases, etc.) and by (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.