Situations of language use

Today, the situation of language use has been examined across a range of research traditions, often under different labels, such as register, communicative situation, speech situation, social situation, or situational context.The context of situation has been the primary focus of Systemic Functional Linguistics, within which particular situations realize the meaning potential of language (e.g., Matthiessen 2019).Variationist linguistics has explored situational factors alongside linguistic variables, combining language-external and language-internal constraints in modeling language variation (e.g., Szmrecsanyi 2019).In computational linguistics, situational context has served as a foundation for text classification and genre modeling (e.g., Argamon 2019).Stylistics and stylometry have increasingly recognized the role of situation in shaping individual language use, illustrating the benefits of such joint analyses from a forensic linguistic perspective (e.g., Marko, Reitbauer, & Pickl 2022), advocated a reevaluation of linguistic creativity as contextually determined use of language, and examined its relationship to the type of interaction and the social roles of the participants along a cline representing differences in social contexts and interaction types (Carter 2004(Carter , 2007)).Situational variables have also featured in discourse analysis (e.g., Lorson, Rhode & Cummins 2023), while audience design has been an area of sociolinguistic research (e.g., Rickford & McNair-Knox 1994), typically focused on user characteristics but acknowledging that speech situation "intersects with social class" (Wolfson 1989: 189).Despite this broad engagement with situational context across fields, differences in conceptualizations and operationalizations have sometimes limited dialogue across research traditions.The contributions to this Special Issue address situational context across written and spoken language, institutional and mediated settings, and production and perception, using corpus-based, experimental, and theoretical approaches.Collectively, this research illustrates how situational analysis can deepen our understanding of linguistic variation within and across disciplines, modalities, and communicative goals.