La deixis espacio-temporal en el lenguaje parlamentario español contemporáneo

Abstract

This paper combines quantitative and qualitative analyses in a corpus-based study of how and for what purposes politicians, in the context of the Spanish Parliament, use spatio-temporal deictic expressions. I begin by contrasting how hoy (today) and aquí (here) are used in parliamentary debate and how these adverbials are employed in non-political language. After comparing the behavior of these forms in both corpora, I argue that extra-linguistic circumstances as well as the iconic power of the parliament as the site of high politics are responsible for the uneven semantic range of such forms. Indeed, we attest a significantly larger presence of the specific (restricted to signaling the contextual information) values of both hoy and aquí in the parliamentary speech corpus. Other deictic forms largely specific to the political corpus will be also discussed.