الوضع الذي وقع به التخاطب
The assignment under which the discourse actually took place.
“Assignment” need not be confined to a word's earliest recoverable sense. It includes a recognized convention through which speaker and listener understand the expression in their particular discourse.
When members of a discipline have an established technical sense for a term, using it in that sense is not figurative merely because everyday speech has another sense. The relevant test is the actual convention governing the utterance.