The concept of discourse tradition (DT) is a core component of the system of language competence developed by Eugenio Coseriu and unfolds its analytical sharpness embedded in the differentiations of that model. The idea of DT is based on the concepts of historicity, individuality and tradition. A central topic of the debates and controversies that have arisen in Romance linguistics is the question of how historicity and individuality enter into the idea of DT. In comparison, the concept of tradition has been studied ...

Texts are linguistic and cultural products. From this fundamental insight of text linguistics it follows that linguistic and cultural knowledge are necessary for the understanding of texts and that the complexity of texts is both a linguistic and a cultural phenomenon. This basic characteristic of text complexity is linked in this article to the model of linguistic competence founded by Eugenio Coseriu, which systematically captures both the rules and traditions entering the text and their patterns of interaction. ...

In everyday language, complexity as a term is characterised by semantic fuzziness and usually describes phenomena that are difficult to assess. For disciplines that study the understanding of texts, it has proven useful to define text complexity as the set of dynamic interactions that arise when the linguistic and cultural levels of a text are activated in the process of understanding. These activations, which lead to semantic constructions and a mental model of the text, are complex and difficult to grasp, as they ...