Since the outbreak of Covid-19 in March 2020 in Jordan that has continued to grow and impact all spheres of our lives, the government has been struggling to curb the pandemic through a range of safety and health measures. To this end, the government officials have employed diverse linguistic strategies in different media outlets to realize persuasion on the target audience in order to increase their awareness about the ongoing crisis and win public compliance and cooperation. Therefore, the present paper seeks, as its overriding goal, to explore the common linguistic strategies used by the Jordanian government to enhance its credibility and convince the public of the importance of effective adherence to its Covid-19 related policies (e.g. social distancing, face mask wearing, and self-hygiene). As an eclectic method of inquiry, the study draws generally on the perspective of discourse analysis and pragmatics. In addition, our analysis is informed by a corpus-based approach. The synthesis of our findings demonstrates that the government consistently and systematically utilizes various strategies for its persuasive intention (e.g. metaphor, repetition, and religious quotation). It also shows that the rationale beyond the respective persuasive techniques seems to win public compliance and cooperation, reassure the public, undermine opponent's counterclaims, and project a trustworthy and praiseworthy image.

Although deixis has received increasingly academic attention in linguistic research, its use in sermons, particularly in the Islamic context, has been largely underexplored. Therefore, this paper examined deixis in Islamic Friday sermons from the perspective of pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on Levinson’s Framework, it aimed at analyzing three main types of deixis (personal, temporal, and spatial), focusing on their forms, features, functions, and frequency. The data were a corpus of 70 sermons compiled by the researcher from various online websites. The study employed qualitative and quantitative methods to meet the purpose of the study. The findings revealed that these three deictic types were relatively common in the language of the respective corpus with the personal type being predominant, deictically pointing to different referents whose interpretation was sensitive to the context in which they occurred. As an affectively powerful tool in the corpus, the preachers utilized deixis to serve a wide variety of functions on the discourse and pragmatic levels. In the corpus, deictic expressions worked as a discourse strategy to persuade the listeners by drawing their attention and engaging them in the message of the sermon and to signal and organize the flow of information in the ongoing discourse. They also served to enhance togetherness, intimacy, and politeness between the preachers and their audience. This study is hoped to present a good basis for further linguistic investigation of deixis in other languages and religions to illuminate how deictics work in sermonic discourse.

The present study aims at examining and describing the uses of the discourse marker "wallahi" in Jordanian spoken Arabic. To meet the purpose of the study, a corpus of 8 hours of spoken discourse has been collected, including face-to -face as well as cell phones conversations. The study employs 26 participants, varied in gender, age, education, and job. Due to the fact that it is massively frequent in Jordanian Arabic, this DM has been chosen foran in-depth functional study. The nature of the study is exploratory and functional, attempting to provide a corpus -based description and analysis. As a qualitative research, an eclectic analytical method is employed as a theoretical framework to account for the functions of the discourse marker wallahi. In addition, it relies on utilizing direct observation technique for analyzing the DM wallahi in the corpus under investigation. The results of the study show that the DM wallahi is multifunctional, serving ten functions in the present corpus: to introduce an acceptance, an apology, a threat,and a compliment, and to serve as a request softener, a marker of elaboration, a continuer, a marker of confirmation, a marker of complying with a request, and a filler marker.

This study investigates the key forms of address used amongst Jordanian university students, the impact of gender on using these forms and what accounts for the variation in their address system. By addressing the issue of normativity and heterogeneity in the use of address terms, in different social settings, the study enriches the understanding of the internal variation of the address term system. Data collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were analysed, based on Watts’ discursive approach to politeness and Agha’s approach of indexicality. The results revealed that the identified normative patterns represent Jordanian university politic behaviours, which index different social meanings and relations among the youth community, in relation to specific social contexts. The most frequent strategies university students use for addressing others are personal names, innovative terms, descriptive phrases, pronouns, titles, teknonyms, and religious, military, attention attractors, as well as a combination of these terms. It also seems that there are no absolute stable patterns of address term usage among the youth community, speaking Jordanian Arabic. Rather, there is an infinite society-internal heterogeneity in the address terms usage. The results also revealed that an intra-group variation signifies social struggles over the norms of address term usage and potentially normative incertitude.

The aim of the present study is to investigate the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the argumentative compositions written by EFL learners at two academic stages (sophomores and seniors) majoring in English at the Hashemite University, Jordan. The significance of this study springs from its focus on the use of DMs in Jordanian EFL learners’ argumentative writings. Employing an integrated research method of qualitative and quantitative analysis, the findings revealed that both groups of participants used the same types of DMs with varying degree of frequency, namely, elaborative, contrastive, reason, inferential, conclusive, and exemplifier DMs, respectively. The sophomores were observed to employ a relatively higher number of DMs compared to the seniors, which may be ascribed to some redundant instances of DMs. The elaborative, contrastive, and reason types were the most widely used, while inferentials, conclusives and exemplifiers appeared infrequently in both groups. The analysis of individual DMs displayed that the DMs ‘and’, ‘because’, and ‘but’ were the predominant across the seniors and sophomores’ argumentative texts. This overuse of these DMs may be due to the influence of L1 of the participants and the popularity of these DMs among students and teachers of English. Additionally, the participants showed a low proficiency in using DMs since they overused largely a restricted variety of DMs at the expense of others that would be expected in the argumentative writing; some DMs were noticed either to be underused or absent. The results of Pearson’s r correlation test indicated that there was a weak positive but significant correlation between the writing quality and the use of DMs. This may be taken as a predictor of the writing quality in argumentative compositions by EFL. Pedagogically, the study emphasizes the significance of teaching DMs, where EFL learners should be taught how to use them appropriately to avoid any transference of their L1. Further research on DMs in argumentative writings in different levels of proficiency is recommended.