Understanding Complex Constructions: A Quantitative Corpus-Linguistic Approach to the Processing of English Relative Clauses

The present work offers a corpus-based approach to the processing of complex constructions, specifically bi-clausal English relative clause constructions (RCC). At the most general level, the goal of the investigation is to help bridge the gap between linguistic and psycholinguistic research. Following a usage-based view on grammar (Langacker 2008), it is presumed that the processing demand of a linguistic structure is best portrayed as a function of a language user’s prior experience with that structure. In the theoretical part of this paper, it is first argued that it is advantageous to assume a constructionist perspective on language (e.g Goldberg 2006), which discards a principled distinction between lexicon and grammar and instead holds that linguistic knowledge comprises of a large assembly of symbolic structures, which are termed constructions. These pairings of form and meaning may assume various degrees of specificity so as to incorporate linguistic material as concrete as a morpheme, but also material as abstract as a syntactic pattern. On this view, RCCs constitute highly abstract symbols, so called schematic constructions or schemas. The constructionist conception of linguistic knowledge is then tied to an exemplar-theoretic view on language representation and processing (e.g. Bod 2009). In exemplar-based models of language, the processing of a linguistic structure is heavily dependent on the prior usage-frequency of that structure and, by implication, on the frequency of the pattern in the ambient language. Processing a linguistic structure then is classifying the structure relative to the inventory of structures already laid down in memory. As the mental representation of a linguistic structure is strengthened with each instance of usage and representational strength effects classification-time, frequent structures are easier to process. Patterns that occur with very high frequencies thus enjoy a privileged status in the cognitive system of a language user. In cognitive construction grammars, this