In his 1932 article Syntaxis en dialectstudie I (Syntax and dialect study 1), the Dutch linguist G.S. Overdiep made a plea for a systematic synchronic and comparative study ofthe syntax ofDutch dialects. Although Overdiep contributed to the study of dialect syntax and made various observations about the dimensions of dialectal variation in Dutch, a broad-scale and systematic study of the syntax ofDutch dialects was beyond the scope ofthe research possibilities at the time. The SAND (Syntactische Atlas van de Nederlandse Dialecten) fiUs the gap that Overdiep noted. Various phenomena of dialect syntax that were only briefly mentioned in his (1936) Stilistische grammatica van het moderne Nederlands receive a systematic description and analysis in the SAND. Thus, the SAND provides us with what Overdiep made a plea for. In this article, I further point out that the dimensions of dialectal variation as observed in the SAND for the Dutch clausal domain can be used as a general background for identifying dimensions of variation in other categorial domains, such as the noun phrase. The underlying assumption here is that phrases (e.g. clauses and noun phrases) display a certain amount of cross-categorial similarity. This, arguably, also holds for the types of variation attested in the two categorial domains.