„Daniel Wiechmann‘s Understanding Relative Clauses presents an extremely detailed and methodologically interesting quantitative corpus analysis of one of the most debated syntactic structures in the field of (psycho)linguistics, namely, relative clause constructions (RCCs). [...] To sum up, Understanding Relative Clauses reports an interesting analysis of these constructions and suggests a compelling hypothesis of language processing, making it an essential read for scholars working on RCC5 and related constructions, as well as in the fields of corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics more generally.“
Minna Kirjavainen in: Cagnitive Linguistics 2017; 28(1): 203—208

Understanding Relative Clauses

Name: Understanding Relative Clauses
Author: Daniel Wiechmann

A Usage-Based View on the Processing of Complex Constructions

von Daniel Wiechmann

The book offers a usage-based account of how humans comprehend complex linguistic structures. The author proposes a theory of constructional access, which treats syntactic patterns as complex and abstract signs. In this view, syntactic processing is subject to the very same dynamics as lexical processing and should yield the same type of frequency effects.