Title of Special Issue: Situational Context in Register Studies

Call for papers

Situation of language use has been at the forefront of register studies. Register research in text-linguistics has documented systematic situational variation and its relationship to functional language use across culturally recognized register categories, among texts within register categories, and across hybrid registers (e.g., Biber, 1988; Biber & Egbert, 2018; Biber, Egbert, Keller, 2020). Situations of language use have also been explored by a variety of other research traditions (and referred to as ‘register,’ ‘communicative situation,’ ‘speech situation,’ ‘social situation,’or ‘situational context’). For example, the contribution of the situation of language use to explaining linguistic variation is examined alongside linguistic variables in variationist linguistics (e.g., Szmrecsanyi , 2019). In computational research, it has served as the basis for text classification (e.g., Argamon, 2019). The effect of situations of use on individual language use is being recognized in stylistics and stylometry (e.g., Marko, Reitbauer & Pickl, 2022). Additionally, some situational variables, such as the audience and their relative status to the addressor, have been central to sociolinguistic research (e.g., Rickford & McNair-Knox, 1994) and discourse analysis (e.g., Lorson et al., 2023).

To synthesize the variety of perspectives, approaches, and conceptualizations, Register Studies invites proposals that elevate the role of situational context in register research. We welcome a wide range of empirical, methodological, or theoretical papers under this scope. Papers for this special issue should highlight situational context and its integration into register studies.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Applications of situational analysis to corpus design and evaluation Analysis of situational variation across and within registers Detailed analyses of communicative events and their communicative strategies (e.g., conflict, celebration, social gathering, etc.) Descriptions of frameworks for situational analysis Approaches to coding for situational characteristics Generality and specificity of situational parameters Situation in applied research (e.g., pedagogy, medical discourse, legal discourse, etc.) The psycholinguistic reality of situational distinctions Interaction of the situation of language use with other predictor variables (e.g., social status, gender) New, unaccounted for (configurations of) situational parameters and/or novel/nonstandard situations of language use Cross-cultural situational differences and/or situations unique to particular linguistic communities Situation of language use and discourse-pragmatic variation Situation of technology-mediated interactions

Important Dates

Deadline for proposals: April 15, 2024 Invitations to submit a manuscript: May 1, 2024 Initial manuscripts due: October 1, 2024 Notification of review outcome: December 1, 2024 Final manuscripts due: February 28, 2025 Special issue publication: 7:2 - Fall 2025

Proposal Format & Submission

Submit a one-page abstract for your proposed article to Associate Editors Larissa Goulart and Marianna Gracheva at Register.Studies@gmail.com. Please include your full contact information and a draft title. For empirical studies, the abstract should introduce the topic and motivate the study, summarize the methodological approach, describe the data to be analyzed, and summarize preliminary results. Abstracts for theoretical and methodological articles should introduce and motivate the issue to be addressed, and explain the main premises that will be included in the article. Please follow the style guide for Register Studies (available at the journal website: https://benjamins.com/catalog/rs).

Peer Review All manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review following the journal’s standard process.

References:

Biber, D. 1988. Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge University Press. Biber, D., & Egbert, J. (2018). Register variation online. Cambridge University Press. Biber, D., Egbert, J., & Keller, D. (2020). Reconceptualizing register in a continuous situational space. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 16(3), 581–616. Argamon, S. (2019). Computational register analysis and synthesis. Computation and Language. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1901.02543 Lorson, A., Rhode, H., & Cummins, C. (2023). Epistemicity and communicative strategies. Discourse Processes, 60(8), 556–593. Marko, K., Reitbauer, M., & Pickl, G. (2022). Same person, different platform. Challenges and implications for forensic authorship analysis. An exploratory study of Instagram and Twitter users. Register Studies, 4(2), 202–231. Rickford, J. R. & McNair-Knox, F. (1994). Addressee- and topic-influenced style shift: a quantitative sociolinguistic study. In D. Biber & E. Finegan (Eds.), Sociolinguistic perspectives on register (pp. 235–276). Oxford University Press. Szmrecsanyi, B. (2019). Register in variationist linguistics. Register Studies, 1(1), 76–99.