Situational analysis as a tool for interpreting within-discipline linguistic variations in disciplinarywriting

Abstract Situational analysis (SA), defined by Biber and Conrad (2019) as the description of the characteristics of use of registers, is a key step in any corpus study of text varieties. Register SA is essential not only for the collection of a representative corpus, but also for the interpretation of the linguistic characteristics of the register, i.e., the description of the relationship between the situational characteristics and the linguistic features. The present paper reports the SA that was conducted as the first step of a comparative study of the formulaic profiles of two registers in the medical field: the research article and the case report. The findings revealed that both registers share the overarching goals of advancing medical research and practice and have medical pathologies and treatments as general topics but differ fundamentally in their specific communicative purposes, channels, and production circumstances, resulting in noticeable linguistic variations in the two registers.