A Pragmatic Analysis of Spatial Deixis in the Discussions of the General Budget by the Jordanian MPs for the Financial Year 2017

Pragmatics as a sub-branch of applied linguistics deals with language and its context. Deixis belongs to the area of pragmatics because it directly involves the relationship between the structure of language and the context in which it is used Levinson (1983:55). The present study investigates the use of spatial deixis in the speeches delivered by the Jordanian parliament members discussing the general budget. Ten different speeches were randomly selected from a number of speeches delivered by members of the eighteenth Jordanian parliament in discussion of general budget 2017. The study analyses spatial deixis in terms of occurrence frequency. The study concludes that proximal terms are the most frequent used by MPs followed by distal terms whereas medial terms were the least occurred ones.