What Is a Situation?

Our everyday use of the term situation suggests that it is unproblematic to decide what constitutes a situation in which language happens. At the same time it seems to be important to account for what a situation is like since situational factors have been found to influence systematically the properties of the language which occurs in that situation. We are investigating a corpus of (simulated) human-computer interaction in which the simulated system’s utterances are produced independent of what the speaker says according to a fixed schema with recurring phases. This way, what one communication partner utters is both intraand interpersonally comparable. The corpus thus provides a unique opportunity to study linguistic behaviour in a completely fixed situation in which even the contributions of one of the speakers can be controlled. Although situational variables are kept constant in this corpus, the speakers’ linguistic behaviour varies both intraand interpersonally. Given the hypothesized strong connection between situation and linguistic behaviour, the variability of the linguistic properties observable constitutes a problem. With respect to intrapersonal variation, the variability can be attributed to a change in speaker attitude towards the system. In order to explain interpersonal variation, the corpus is checked for indicators of how speakers conceptualize the situation. What speakers believe about their communication partners can be shown to correlate with aspects of their linguistic behaviour. Instead of defining a situation by means of extra-linguistic variables, it is suggested to treat a situation as a speaker category, that is, as a complex concept to which the speakers themselves can be shown to attend.