Jieun Kiaer puts forward an argument in this book that the grammar of a language directly underpins the processing of the language, in real time. This is a view that runs against the orthodoxy of linguistic theorizing for the last 50 years, which has insisted that languages have to be characterized in terms that make little or no reference to the dynamics of language use.

This orthodox view fails to fit languages in which the verb has to be at the end of the clause - which encompasses more than half of the world's languages. Thus, as this book shows, these languages remain very...