ABSTRACT
There has been considerable interest within linguistics, psychology, and education concerning the linguistic characterization of discourse complexity. Most of this research focuses on comprehension, addressing the question of what linguistic characteristics of a text make it more or less understandable or readable. However, an equally important question takes a production perspective, analyzing complexity differences in the language produced in different situations. It is for the reason that the present study focuses exclusively on the system of discourse complexity. This chapter describes the differs from the analysis in two major respects: it focuses exclusively on linguistic features associated with discourse complexity, and it adopts a theory-based rather than exploratory approach. The texts included in the present study include many combinations of these situational parameters. The chapter focuses on 33 linguistic features that have been associated with discourse complexity. The occurrences of these features are counted in each text, and these counts are normalized to frequency per 1,000 words.
