Studien zur performanzorientierten Linguistik Aspekte der Relativsatzextraposition im Deutschen

Looking at relative clause extraposition in German as a concrete example, the paper demonstrates how linguistic model building, corpus study and psycholinguistic experiments combine into an integrational research programme that aims at an improved understanding and linguistically as well as cognitively adequate modelling of human language performance. Starting from the word order theory articulated by (Hawkins, 1994), we formulate hypotheses on the positional distribution of relative clauses and evaluate them on the basis of data drawn from corpus analyses and acceptability experiments. Our empirical studies confirm the expectation that grammatical weight has a significant effect on relative clause distribution; at the same time, there is an interesting asymmetry between language production and perception data.