María José Serrano is a Full Professor of Linguistics at the Universidad de La Laguna (Spain). Her main areas of expertise include morphosyntactic variation from a discursive-pragmatic and cognitive approach, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. Miguel A. Aijón Oliva is a Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the Universidad de Salamanca (Spain). His research activity focuses on variation in grammar from functional and sociopragmatic viewpoints, particularly in mass media and digital environments.

• Nikolas Coupland: Foreword – Miguel A. Aijón Oliva/María José Serrano: Introduction: Variation, choice, and the construction of meaning – Antonio Fábregas: Variation, syntax, and semantics: Person features and the non- specific reading of participants – María José Serrano: Variation of the independent infinitive and the desubjectivizing viewpoint of discourse – Miguel A. Aijón Oliva: Defocusing constructions, viewpoint, and reference: The shaping of public institutions vs. citizens in digital opinion pieces – Benjamin Mielenz: Variation in hypothetical conditional structures in the Spanish of Astorga – Dania Ramos Martín: Subject position in Hispanic yes/ no interrogatives: A description according to utterance pragmatic function and geographical variation in a corpus of written speech – Francisco Javier García Yanes: A semantic approach to mood variation: Habitual and factual clauses introduced by después (de) que – Dunia Catalina Méndez Vallejo: Understanding the Focalizing Ser structure: Going beyond syntax.