One of the most widespread developments in sociolinguistics over the past 20 years has been the claim that meaning is contingent. Pushing back against a belief in language as a stable reflection of social structure, research across the field has focused on the diverse ways that meanings emerge in context, the processes through which such meanings are regimented and evaluated by competing ideological systems, and the strategic creativity of individuals when using language to achieve various social, political and interactional goals. While debates remain about how best to capture the underlying indeterminacy of language, and while uptake of these ideas has itself varied across different areas of our field, we believe that the discipline of sociolinguistics today shares a common belief in the situated nature of linguistic phenomena and in the importance of taking individuals' lived experiences of language into account.

A second important thread lies in debates about the nature of language itself. Much sociolinguistic work has insisted on the nature of language as a broad set of communicative practices, attending to a wide range of communicative resources. From multimodality to embodiment, sociolinguists have sought to understand language not as an autonomous object, but as embedded, multifacted practice and process.

Art, like language, is also an attempt to represent, evaluate and, ultimately, engage with the world around us, and to do so in ways that highlight both subjective and collective experience and resist epistemological closure. Perhaps for this reason, a growing number of sociolinguists have begun turning their attention to art, either by collaborating directly with artists or by involving art in their research. We believe that it is worth bringing this engagement between sociolinguistics and art to the attention of the readership of the Journal of Sociolinguistics.

We are therefore launching a new Theme Series on Sociolinguistics + Art. Contributions to the series will appear occasionally and will feature brief discussions of the work being done, including (where possible) depictions of relevant artistic outputs. We do so without any specific predefined objectives other than to showcase forms of scholarly and/or artistic expression that lie on the fringes, or completely outside, of current conventions of traditional scholarship. Topics to be covered in the series will include an exploration of the materiality of sociolinguistic practice in art exhibitions, the use of text by artists as an aesthetic object, art as a field of expression to be taken as seriously as verbal expression in sociolinguistic research, and the embodied and multimodal experience of art by viewers, among others. In this issue, Tim McNamara launches the series with a piece on the visual encoding of affect in the work of Mark Rothko, focusing on his own discovery of the emotive potential of Rothko's visual grammar.

在过去 20 年中，社会语言学最广泛的发展之一是声称意义是偶然的。反对将语言视为社会结构的稳定反映的信念，该领域的研究重点关注意义在语境中出现的多种方式，竞争意识形态体系对这些意义进行管理和评估的过程，以及战略创造力个人在使用语言来实现各种社会、政治和互动目标时。虽然关于如何最好地捕捉语言潜在的不确定性的争论仍然存在，并且虽然这些想法的采用本身在我们领域的不同领域有所不同，

第二个重要线索在于关于语言本身性质的争论。许多社会语言学工作坚持认为语言的本质是一组广泛的交际实践，涉及广泛的交际资源。从多模态到具体化，社会语言学家一直试图将语言理解为不是一个自主的对象，而是嵌入的、多方面的实践和过程。

艺术，就像语言一样，也是一种表现、评估并最终与我们周围的世界互动的尝试，并且以突出主观和集体经验并抵制认识论封闭的方式来实现。或许出于这个原因，越来越多的社会语言学家开始将注意力转向艺术，要么直接与艺术家合作，要么让艺术参与他们的研究。我们认为，值得将社会语言学与艺术之间的这种联系引起社会语言学杂志读者的注意。

因此，我们推出了一个新的社会语言学+艺术主题系列。对该系列的贡献将偶尔出现，并将以对正在完成的工作的简短讨论为特色，包括（在可能的情况下）对相关艺术作品的描述。我们这样做没有任何特定的预定义目标，除了展示处于当前传统学术惯例边缘或完全之外的学术和/或艺术表达形式。该系列涵盖的主题将包括探索艺术展览中社会语言学实践的物质性，艺术家将文本用作审美对象，艺术作为一种表达领域，在社会语言学研究中与口头表达一样受到重视，以及观众对艺术的具体和多模式体验等。在这个问题上，