The term “linguistic complexity” is often thrown around lightly, but what exactly is meant by it remains fuzzy and elusive. Its various flavours and facets are influenced by a diverse combination of linguistic and extralinguistic factors, for instance discourse status (Arnold et al. 2000), medium (Biber & Gray 2010), situational setting (Verhoeven & Lehmann 2018), and language development (Weiss & Meurers 2019), to name just a few. And despite the hundreds of measurements of phenomena that contribute to complexity (cf. Lu 2011; Weiss 2017), many open questions about the theoretical models, cognitive processes, and influencing factors behind complexity have yet to be explored.
