Framing the Rhetoric of a Leader ― An Analysis of Obama's Election Campaign Speeches

Framing the Rhetoric of a Leader investigates Barack Obama's much celebrated rhetoric from a cognitive semantics point of view. Based on a selection of 30 election campaign speeches during Obama's first run for the American presidency in 2008, the book provides an application of Lakoff's (1996) Strict Father and Nurturant Parent models of political morality. Degani explores the question of whether the Democratic presidential candidate presented himself as a 'nurturant parent' at this crucial phase in his career, as predicted in Lakoff's models. The empirical approach taken in this book combines the identification of moral values, conceptual metaphors and key terms contained in the speeches to provide a comprehensive analysis of Obama's language and political discourse in the USA. This book will be of great interest to researchers of political discourse, rhetoric and American politics, as well as to speech writers.

Marta Degani is Senior Lecturer of English Linguistics at the University of Verona, Italy. Her research interests include cognitive semantics, varieties of English and discourse analysis. She has published mostly on the analysis of political discourse and the study of bilingualism in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand.