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The 1st International Symposium on Grammatical Variation and the Construction of Meaning aims at becoming a forum for scientific exchange and advancement in the study of linguistic variation ‒ mainly at the morphosyntactic and discursive levels ‒ as a resource for speakers to construct and negotiate meanings in interaction. In this area of research there is an ever-growing awareness that traditional variationist approaches, based on the establishment of correlations between linguistic forms and geographical zones, social ascriptions of speakers or features of the situation, can hardly reach beyond the descriptive level and answer a number of fundamental questions: Why does variation exist in the first place? Are there really different ways of saying the same? Is it possible to elucidate regular or systematic connections between the inherent meanings of grammatical forms and their distribution according to extralinguistic factors? Are processes of diachronic change a mere effect of mechanical and/or sociocultural factors, or do they simultaneously entail the progressive replacement of some meanings with others?