The goal of the project „Studying variation in syntax: a parsed corpus of Swiss German“ is the compilation of a parsed and grammatically annotated corpus of about one million words. Spontaneous speech data are collected during informal interviews with speakers of different age groups who speak the local variety of St. Galler German that is spoken in Wil. After transcribing the interviews, all words are grammatically annotated, disfluency marking is added,and the strings of words are split into tokens before being parsed. Based on this corpus we try to uncover intra-speaker variation as well as inter-speaker variation in order to investigate the relation between syntactic variation and language change. In this paper we focus on the corpus compilation.