tilannesuhteiden

Tilannesuhteiden, roughly translated as "situational relations," is a concept in linguistic semantics that describes how the interpretation of referential expressions, events, and participants is shaped by the surrounding situation. The term tilannesuhteiden is Finnish, formed from tilanne (situation) and suhde (relation), and captures the network of factors—speaker and addressee, time, place, and discourse context—that determine what a given expression refers to in a given moment.

In theoretical use, tilannesuhteiden complements lexical semantics and thematic roles by emphasizing context-dependence. It is especially relevant to deixis, indexicals, and demonstratives, as well as to how tense, aspect, and mood encode situational frames. Analysts distinguish several strands, including temporal relations (when events take place), spatial relations (where), social relations (politeness, authority, proximity), and discourse-relational factors (anaphora, cataphora, perspective shifts).

In practice, tilannesuhteiden helps explain why the same word can point to different referents in different situations. For example, the Finnish demonstratives tämä "this" and tuo "that" align with the speaker's current frame, whereas se "that" can refer to a previously established referent when the situational frame has shifted. The concept is used in language documentation, theoretical semantics, and natural language processing to improve context-aware interpretation and translation.

Related concepts include deixis, indexicals, anaphora, and contextual semantics.